An Op-Ed in Friday’s Times discusses in detail the lack of medical services at the Abu Ghraib prison. This was not an occasional or early-on problem. It was a day in and day out problem over a period of months. It turns out that the medical people accepted the idea of putting a leash on some of the more psychotic prisoners because they had no psychologist to prescribe antipsychotic drugs and they lacked the usual restraining devices. More generally, the prison hospital lacked basic supplies. It often ran out of intravenous fluids and even had a dentist do a heart surgery. When they ran out of the standard blood sugar tests, they simply guessed the right dose of insulin from the appearance of the patients.

This is only the latest chapter in a long history of Pentagon incompetence attending the Iraq adventure. It started back when the SecDef told his people to ignore the State Department’s well thought out plan for what to do after the invasion. This led to confusion in planning at the start. After one poorly planned false start on the civilian side, Bremer was brought in to run the show. One of his first actions was to disband the Iraqi Army and dismiss all people from leading positions in the civil service that had Baath Party connections. Since in Saddam’s Iraq nearly everyone with any education worked for the government, this meant that the best and the brightest and well as hundreds of thousands of less well endowed were suddenly out of work. It also meant that a large part of the populace understood their pensions to be cancelled. This disenfranchised group became the heart of the insurgency and has remained so.

Lack of planning, of thinking through what might happen, led to a more general inability to imagine any problems after attaining a quick victory. The most critical mistake was to underestimate the force that was needed in the field (several generals had this right but no one was listening: Rumsfeld’s light and nimble modern army was the fashion of the day). This led to sending insufficient forces to Iraq. This meant in the first instance that the thin forces that had to hold Baghdad initially had neither the ability nor the orders to protect the country’s archaeological heritage from looting — even though looting on a smaller scale had accompanied the first Gulf War. Lack of adequate planning also included the failure to provide body armor for many soldiers in the field. This led to many people raising money in the States to purchase body armor for their soldiers. Poor planning and inadequate forces in the field led to a massive failure to secure ammunition storage sites throughout the country. It is true these were more numerous than anyone expected, but still when the military learned of the existence of unsecured major sites, many continued to be left unguarded. Even in recent months, we have been told again and again that the vehicles used to transport our military have not been armed adequately — this more than a year after we learned from experience the insurgency’s widespread use of roadside bombs. Even today, one notes in photographs from the front that vehicles often have jury-rigged armor plates bolted on to them.

These massive failures of planning and inability to respond to what was happening in the field should be investigated in full by the military forces, the Pentagon, and Congress. An honest evaluation and accounting may require waiting until a new Administration comes into office. It may not. There are several top Republicans very concerned about the record. As a result of the bungling, many Americans and Iraqis have unnecessarily lost their lives. The war has been unnecessarily drawn out. It has been unnecessarily costly. Before such incompetence is confronted and remedies are carried out, we should never again take off on such an adventure, no matter how appealing it might seem. Let’s put our dreams in quarantine until we are prepared to fully accept their costs and implications.

The recently reported speech of an American General in San Diego that sometimes it was just fun to shoot people has received the usual warning from generals higher up in the command structure, as well as a great deal of negative public commentary. However, what anyone who values humanity and morality must realize is that many people in our military service, the police at all levels in this country, and those employed in local, state, and federal prisons have a vicious streak that is only with difficulty kept under control. This is widely understood, and even sometimes applauded by the general public. While the media were tut tuting about the treatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, as well as similar behavior in other restraining areas set up to assist our “war against terrorism”, I have heard ordinary people with no military connection say, in effect, “they had it coming to them”, “this happens in war” etc.

As a civilized society we must try to reduce such events on three fronts. First, we must of course enter into any war with great reluctance, be prepared to finish it quickly, and to return any prisoners we may have to their societies. Sheer time in the field and length of contact is one of the greatest culprits. Secondly, we must make clear by example that the American government respects international agreements meant to reduce unnecessary killing and brutality in war. This commitment must be communicated down the chain of command, and to all those services such as the CIA that also employ violence. This has not been adequately done. Officers higher up the command structure, civilian or military, must be held responsible for lapses and punished adequately.

Finally, we must make it clear to the American people that the abusing of people in custody, whether in a military or civilian setting is a serious crime. Allowing the International Court to have jurisdiction over Americans would help bring home the lesson. But baring this, we must improve the means by which we employ and keep employed persons in police or prison work within the United States. I realize that these are not jobs most people want. But I also realize that in many communities these are positions that run in families and characterize certain subcommunities. It is in these that the most unfortunate attitudes toward the “other” are passed on from older to younger until a culture develops in which almost anything goes. This was, in fact, one of the aspects of what happened at Abu Ghraib. More must be done to break this cycle, to reform such subcultures, perhaps even to exclude people with certain backgrounds from such work.

Yesterday Peter Galbraith wrote an impassioned plea for an essentially autonomous Kurdistan. Today Leslie Gelb follows it up with a less clear but nevertheless supporting case for a constitution that writes in a large role for the Kurds. This has been something that Galbraith (sometimes with Gelb) has been promoting for a long time. It seems to go back to his experience in Yugoslavia where the country was blown apart because it could not accommodate such ethno-nationalist longings.

Galbraith was one of the first to blow the whistle on the use of chemical weapons against the Kurds. He has worked on the problems of East Timor as well as Iraq and Yugoslavia and is now associated with an institution committed to the struggle against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. He has lately been mounting quite a campaign. One of his arguments for Iraq is that our other more pressing security concerns, such as that relating to nuclear proliferation, compels us to rapidly develop a viable exit policy (See article in the New York Review of Books here in which he writes: “From my experience in the Balkans, I feel strongly that it is impossible to preserve the unity of a democratic state where people in a geographically defined region almost unanimously do not want to be part of that state.”

His thesis now is that the American government has been keeping their head in the sand on this one. They do not want there to be a Kurd problem, so are willing to accept the sweet nothings that Kurdish leaders feed them. Yet the old head of the Kurdish mountaineers, Massoud Barzani, said in an election day interview that “I am certain that there will be an independent Kurdistan and I hope to see it in my lifetime.” It is most reporters on the ground that the Kurdish people as a whole have no use for Iraq. Much of their area does not even fly the Iraq flag. It only adds fuel to the fire that the worst mistake in Sunday’s election appears to have been the failure to deliver about 200,000 ballots to prospective Kurdish voters in the north.

Galbraith curiously seems unwilling to draw the final conclusion from his analysis. He wants the United States to insist on a constitution that gives the Kurds great autonomy within an Iraqi state. This is just what he knows has not worked in these situations. Now the world faces even the splitting off of Montenegro from Serbia, one of the two last acts in the miniaturization of Serbia.

It seems to me that while we struggle with different federal solutions, we should be making a parallel effort to convince all the states in the region that an independent, democratic Kurdistan is better than a festering sore like Northern Ireland, the Tamil resistance in Sri Lanka, or the Basque provinces of Spain. It should also be pointed out that it will reduce the relative size of Iraq by 20% and reduce the size of their economy (presuming the Kurds get all or part of the Kirkuk fields). It will also mean that secularism will dominate politics in an area adjacent to Turkey, which will serve one of the main needs of the Turkish military that fears more than the Kurds the growing militancy of Islam in the region.

At a minimum, we should be sure that we never end up training or even leading troops that are dispatched by Baghdad to put down a Kurdish resistance. We should also abandon the idea of establishing a permanent Middle Eastern military base in Kurdistan, a dream floated back at the beginning of this adventure. In extremis, we could and should provide an aerial cover for Kurdistan, much as we did in the Saddam days, if at some future point this becomes necessary.

In spite of a great deal of sniping by some commentators (such as Herbert in the NY Times and Juan Cole in his excellent blog), the election in Iraq was a great occasion for Bush, for the Middle East, and for the Iraqi people. The defenses held. People went into the streets, and they voted. The heroism of people in much of the country was truly astounding — voting as the mortars went off in the background.

The most amazing renunciation, the one that got us to this point, was the order of the Ayatollah Sistani to his followers to not fight back when they were attacked. The result was that several insurgent attempts to ignite sectarian war got no where at all. The other was his order to all Shi’a to vote, an order that in Baghdad seemed to override the last minute attempt of some in the Mahdi Army to discourage voting.

Of course, we do not yet know the particulars. In some areas many Sunni Arabs voted; in others very few did. The statement of that overall 60% voted is subject to modification. It may well be much less. But it will certainly turn out to be more than 40%, which was the “success” figure some had indicated. It was true that many people had a confused ideas of what they were voting for. But the fact they did not know individuals seems beside the point. They knew of the lists, and seemed remarkably able to distinguish among hundreds of lists. Many of the voters did not want to be seen as Shi’a or Sunni: they were Iraqis and voted as Iraqis. Of course, these distinctions are important, but I think that foreigners in an attempt to make sense of what they are seeing sometimes do overemphasize such differences. Many Iraqis, especially in the major cities, are secular. They want a secular society and care less for these divisions. Perhaps the most important fact was that Arab television in the days before the election and on election day turned its attention to the election, reporting it in full and sometimes with positive commentary.

By the middle of February the results should be sorted out. Then the new Assembly will be established. Lots of bridges must be crossed. But I suspect that before the Assembly is established, the heart will have gone out of the insurgency. It will go on, but decline in intensity. The new government will feel more confident than the one it replaces. The people will feel more confident, and with that the Iraqi governmental forces. I suspect that in the new euphoria there may well be calls for the United States to work out a withdrawal time table.

The tough times for Iraq’s democracy will come when the United States is largely out and the groups begin fighting among themselves (which may include Shi’a versus Shi’a). Many peoples are not good at compromise and compromise is the most essential attribute of democracy.

Whatever results Sunday brings, many will be forced once again to do their moral calculus. Was it worth it? This has been the question throughout human history. Sometimes it clearly was not. World War I with its terrible slaughter of young men on both sides did not advance any human cause very far. World War II and the Civil War, on the other hand, are more complicated.

The immediate answers depend on who you are and where, on your fate and that of those closest to you. Some people in Iraq would take any chance, give up everything, even their own lives to get back at Saddam for what he did to them or their families. Others feel the same about the Americans. But neither of these feelings make a war “worth it” unless there is a real improvement in the lives of those who come afterwards. President Bush tells the Iraqi people that a broad and wonderful future is opening in front of them. Some believe it, especially it appears those Iraqis who live outside the country. But that American soldier’s family in Iowa, does it believe it? Do they care that much that the Iraqis have a chance to build a freer society? Were they willing to sacrifice their son? Is not the President pursuing the goals of a grand plan over the bodies of ordinary people who have not been adequately consulted? How does America conduct foreign policy in a world in which sometimes people will be killed on both sides without adequate consultation?

Last night Juan Cole and another expert on the Lehrer news show suggested that the election would be a success if more than 40% of eligible voters participated (in the range of the “success” of the recent Palestinian vote). Considering the fact that at least half the Shiites and most of the Kurds are outside the violent areas, this suggestion seemed encouraging. The percentages that might be imagined are: 65% of Kurds (or 12% of total), 60% of half of the Shiites (or 20% of total) and 30% of half of Shiites (12% of total) and 10% of Sunni Arabs (or 2% of total). This should add up to a total vote of 46%. I expect that well less than a third of the potential “overseas vote” will actually come in. However, in my own calculations this doesn't mean much. There simply were too few polling places in most countries (5 in the United States for example). In spite of heroic efforts most people could not make this effort.

My hopes were raised when I noted that the areas of violence in Baghdad had greatly declined in Sadr City over previous months while holding the same in the rest of the city. However, by today’s paper we learn that al-Sadr’s lieutenants are telling their people not to vote (even though some of the Mahdi Army are on the lists). This strikes quite a blow at my confidence. So we will see. Generally these things turn out better than expected.

If the election is widely viewed as a failure, then there will be a demand on the American home front that we leave (the insurgents have this right).

The Department of Defense has let it be known that for some time it has been taking a direct role in the gathering of intelligence in front line situations such as Afghanistan and Iraq. The newspapers point out that this is part of a long-running turf battle between the CIA and the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency). It seems to me that what Defense is doing makes sense. If we have troops in an area, then the intelligence service most closely related to those troops should be the one that has responsibility for intelligence gathering for those troops. Ideally, each part of our defensive establishment, whether it be special forces or homeland security, whatever unit is meant to act offensively or defensively should be directly connected to an intelligence capability. The situation is quite different for strategic intelligence. Here the CIA and the Department of State’s intelligence bureau should be the main sources of intelligence. For in this case the intelligence gathered should go to the top and then back down to the action agencies.

The Bush doctrine as developed in his Inaugural Address on January 20 was a remarkable statement of his approach to the world. In many ways it mirrored long held beliefs of Americans. But it some ways it fell short of outlining the path to a free and peaceful world that he believed he was describing.

The first problem is that he does not go beyond the false assumption behind his policy and the thinking of many commentators that America is hated and attacked because the attackers live in tyrannies. As has been discussed here frequently, writers such as “Anonymous” and Clarke argue convincingly that it is because of American policy, particularly in regard to Israel and Saudi Arabia, that we were attacked. There is little suggestion in the speech that we are going to change our policies in these regards.

Another problem with the Bush doctrine is that it defines “freedom” primarily as democracy. It is true that “self-government” is mentioned, but this generally seems to be interpreted as the development of a democratic system for established states. The reason to make this point is that the Wilson doctrine which Bush has echoed concentrated on “self-determination for all”. This led to the breaking up of states, particularly in Europe. Wilson felt that all peoples should be able to govern themselves. He evidently also believed that peoples given this right would inevitably develop democracy, which unfortunately many did not (or their democracies soon collapsed). There is no hint in Bush’s statement or in the conduct of our foreign policy during his administration that we are going to stand up for the many peoples around the world that are struggling for self-government, whether or not this means democracy. This includes the Tibetans, the Uighurs, the Chechens, the Kurds, the people of West Irian and the Acheh in northern Sumatra or the people of Darfur. It includes many peoples scattered across Africa that never asked to be put into the states they now find themselves in. One doubts that Bush will move to “free” these peoples.

Confining himself to existing states, then, does Bush really mean that he is going to tell the leaders of the Gulf Sheikhdoms, of Saudi Arabia, China, Pakistan, and so many other states with which we and or allies have developed a modus vivendi that they must change into democracies? No, he does not mean this. He means to say that we cannot have good relations with any state that does not treat its people “decently”. This is a good human rights standard with which few can quarrel.

Words have consequences, especially when they are American words. An expert on Iran argued that the reason the Shah caved into the opposition in the late 1970s, a retreat that led directly to Khomeini, was that the Iranians had listened President Carter’s affirmation of human rights, a affirmation that led the opposition (originally liberals) to believe they could test the regime as they had never before. If the same thing were to happen in Pakistan or China or Saudi Arabia, the outcome might not be what we would like. It also might not support the expansion of freedom in the long run.

My conclusion is that the speech was a surprisingly good statement of ideals. But using the forum that he did, it was perhaps too blunt, too likely to be misinterpreted. Once given, we must step back a little and tread lightly into the free new world.

With the possibility of an amicable development of relations among the major groups in Iraq it seems to me that thought should be given to developing a federal system. As readers will remember, I have always insisted that the Kurds should be allowed to have a state of their own. But without American support this seems unlikely.

A fallback position has always been strong autonomy for the Kurds within the new Iraq. Curiously, the interim constitution states that if any three provinces do not accept the constitution (meaning the amount of autonomy granted to the three) then the new constitution will be invalid. This clause was put into the constitution to satisfy the Kurds with their three provinces. But now it appears that the Sunni Arabs have noted that they dominate another three provinces, and that this clause also gives them a veto.

I would think that a good solution would be to have four regional governments, each with considerable autonomy. These would be the Sunni Arab provinces north and west of Baghdad, the Kurdish provinces in the Northeast, Baghdad itself, and the rest in a large Shi’a province in the center or south. (They may want more, so why not.) Regional governments are always in danger of being crushed by the center or flying off into independent states. So it is how to know how this would play out in the end. But there is a lot of inter-group hostility in the country and this might be a way to assuage it. The hardest problem would be to figure out what to do with the Peshmurga, the very strong militia that the Kurds count on to defend their interests. The Kurds would feel mighty exposed without it. But how would this fit into the new scheme of things?

As hard as it may be for the many doubters of President Bush’s poorly planned adventure in Iraq to believe it, it appears now as though the election may come off reasonably well and that the aftermath will not be a disaster.

This last week apparently attacks tapered off. This is not much help to those still being killed, but it is a good sign. I assume violence will intensify again, with a crescendo on the actual voting days.

While all this takes place, Iraqi politicians are moving in surprisingly positive directions. The leaders of the top Shi’a parties have announced that if they win, they do not intend to set up a religious government of any kind. There will be no “turbans” in government positions. They intend to establish a secular state because that is what they feel the people of Iraq really want. This state will not require women to cover up as is the case in so many other Islamic states. These statements go considerably beyond what Sistani has suggested before. They seem aimed at pleasing the Sunni Arabs (who partly for nationalist reasons fear an Iranian state), the Kurds who have developed a quite secular way of life in their enclave and do not want to lose that, and of course the Americans who have all along feared the Ayatollahs taking over a la Iran (in spite of the assurances by such as Juan Cole that this is not what the Shi’as want). Now we should be careful. It almost seems too good to be true. We must remember that Khomeini was believed at first to want such a relatively secular state too. His first Prime Minister was a member of the old liberal opposition to the Shah. But this did not last long. Just a thought.

In the Sunni Arab community, some leaders are continuing to stand for election while others say their followers will not vote. However, most of them say that they will in any event have a hand in writing the Constitution. In other words, they are not rejecting the process of movement toward a new state that is to occupy 2005. How they will participate, and whether they will be satisfied with their part is another question.

Richard Clarke of Congressional Hearing fame was the leading person in the war against terrorism before 2002. His book, now more than a year old, tells of his struggles within several administrations to get them to listen to him and his friends, a cabal within government that was obsessed with the danger to the country of terrorists, and particularly of Ussama bin Ladin and al-Qaida. He got further with the Clinton people than he did with the Bush, even though he was for a time allowed to continue his work alongside Bush's National Security Council. Bush's people never took him or his ideas seriously. There were many reasons, but one important one was that they simply did not accept ideas or issues or approaches that they associated with the Clinton years.

He is a harsh critics of many of the entrenched persons and approaches of the FBI and CIA, as well as the too predictable reactions of the Pentagon and the military brass. Many heroes from these agencies shine through the narrative, but the overall picture is negative. The CIA and the FBI and their subdivisions remain more interested in turf than in the national interest. The Homeland Security Department was a failure from the beginning: poorly planned, poorly staffed, given impossible jobs with no additional money and very little time to accomplish its objectives. His harshest criticism is of those in the Administration who came into office determined to conquer Iraq no matter what. For them, 9/11 was a handy excuse. This may have not been the case with Bush himself, but he sees Bush as an essentially unfocused figurehead unwilling to really try to understand anything. Our conquest and continued involvement in Iraq has enflamed the Islamic world and trained a new generation of terrorists much as the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan did. The reader has probably heard these opinions of Clarke from the news media and his appearances before Congress. On the negative side, in the book he appears self-interested, conceited, cocksure of everything. He no doubt overinflates his importance at critical junctures in the story. One might not like working with Clarke, but fundamentally he means well, is very knowledgeable, and should be listed to.

He believes the country should be spending a great deal more on homeland security than it does. Even the first responders have been starved for funds (NYPD had to reduce its police force after 9/11). New intelligence resources, even a new analytic agency should be developed, preferably separate from the CIA and the FBI, but possible housed within the latter. Someone has to deal intelligently with the intelligence stream and no one is! He would like to see us spend more on the propaganda wars, doing the kind of things that we managed to do in the cold war in our struggle against communism. He is a little too sanguine about efforts to reform Islam from the outside, but he is more helpful when he agrees with Anonymous on the necessity of modifying our actions in the Middle East in a way that will reduce hatred.

His identifies the countries we should be targeting in the region as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. He considers Iran to have been and be much more important in the support of terrorism (Hezbollah especially) and the development of nuclear weapons than Iraq. This does not mean that we should invade Iran. It means that we should take it more seriously through an approach that would work both with the present leadership and work to replace that leadership. He agrees with Friedman (today's Op-Ed) that Iran has a large number of pro-Americans. We have to help them create a democratic state. But we must do it in a way that does not seem to make Iranian students into CIA agents. I agree, but it is a difficult proposition..

If this election succeeds at all in the most challenged provinces it will be a true miracle. I hope the Bush team has his staff praying hard. 90,000 election kits are being sent out to 5500 polling places in the next few days. 200,000 poll workers have been trained. Each polling place consists of a room with a variety of tables that each person must come by. When it is over, the workers will sit down and count the votes, shipping the results (and the ballots?) to Baghdad over the next few days. Now each voter has to have his finger marked with a special dye that will last at least a week. This all in a country in which major roads even in the better areas are seldom safe, and where the insurgency has claimed that voters are traitors to the country and/or Islam. If you had seen insurgents active in your area, would you go to the polling stations? Would you take the chance that someone might stop you and demand to see your finger? One hopes that Iraqis are made of sterner stuff than you or I.

What to do about China?

Zhao Ziyang, the head of the Communist Party of China in the 1980s, fell from favor with the real leaders of the country in 1989 because he favored treating the students demonstrating in Tiananmen Square less harshly. Since then he has been under house arrest and seldom allowed to be mentioned. Now he has died. His death has hardly been acknowledged, obituaries are not allowed, eulogies are erased from web sites and chat rooms in so far as the authorities can get to them. A private memorial is being allowed, but no one important can come. His long-time aide has been prevented from leaving his house to attend.

This is the China that much of the world is trumpeting as the coming leader of Asia and perhaps the world. This is the China where an amazing percent of consumer products consumed in the West are now being manufactured. This is the China where economic growth is supposed to be laying the basis for a transition to democracy. But life in China seems so far from democracy. Its leaders thumb their noses at demands for more civil freedoms, let alone political. The Western media are quick to criticize Putin’s Russia, but Russia today has far more freedom than China. The totalitarian practice of erasing history, of creating nonbeings, is no longer practiced there.

How do we get a handle on the problem of China? How do we help China become part of modern civilization before it gets any more powerful? I do not know. But we could begin by taking down a few bridges, by emphasizing the differences between Taiwan and China, and by reducing our interest in trade, free or otherwise.

Yesterday’s optimism surrounding the election discussion needs to be corrected in several regards.

First, the idea that there were going to be a million Iraqis voting outside the country was apparently wildly off. By today’s figures it appears the election board will be lucky to get 100,000. This changes the picture considerably. Does it mean that overseas Iraqis are uninterested? Does it mean there has been coercion in overseas communities? Does it mean that election organization (for example with only five places to register in the United States) was massively inadequate? I do not know.

Secondly, there seems to be a darker mood in Iraq than I was reporting. An Iraqi government official says that if not enough people vote (apparently he means Sunni Arabs), it is likely to lead to civil war. A U.S. intelligence report sees a great deal of violence after the election. The report also considers the probability of civil war to be substantial. At the same time, reports are that the Shiite parties are posed to demand from the Americans a time table for leaving after the election. Condoleezza Rice and other American officials say that there can be no time table. It depends on how well the Iraqis do in establishing their own security forces. Here, too, there is much dissension. Condi tells the Senate that we now have 120,000 trained Iraqi security forces; Senator Biden says that we are lucky if we have 4000. And so it goes.

As the days toward the upcoming election drag on, we hear a steady drumbeat of reported assassinations, roadside bombs, attacks on police stations, attacks on anyone in any way connected to the election. Yet we also read of the continuing hope of the Iraqi people that the election will mean something. Seven to eight million are expected to vote in the country, another million overseas. It is now estimated that 2/3 of the people of Baghdad will participate. Half of these are expected to vote for secular parties; half for religious. Perhaps a million overseas Iraqis are registering at considerable expense and expected to vote. Among the overseas, there are few reports of killings or fears. Particularly in the United States, the Iraqis seem happy to have the opportunity. Fear does not stalk the community. For Americans, used to a soft, carefree life in the suburbs, it seems inconceivable that the potential Iraqi voters in Iraq could be this blasé about the dangers, so ready to face the possibility of death from unknown enemies. Candidates are campaigning, if only in secret. They are assisted by the fact that voters are voting for parties rather than individuals, thereby reducing candidate exposure. In the toughest areas they have decided to have registration and voting occur at the same time to reduce the exposure of the voters before election day.

My belief is that the vote will take place on January 30; in most of the country it will be a success; the Shi’a candidates will win overwhelmingly, but they will not be a unified force within the parliament; Sunni Arab and Kurdish leaders will be given a role in the resulting government. After this God only knows. It may all break apart again. Elections are by no means the end of the game. We can only hope that we can with a little urging from the new government find a graceful exit.

If this is pulled off, some heroes in heroic organizations need to be recognized. In Iraq, it is the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq and their thousands of employees working with the assistance of the United Nations. Outside Iraq, it is the International Organization for Migration, a group associated with the United Nations that has done a phenomenal job in just a few weeks. And again back in Iraq, it is the more than a thousand candidates that have allowed their names to be put on party lists, and finally it is the millions of individual voters willing to take a chance on democracy. I know, talking this way sounds too much like George, but we have to be prepared to admit that his foolish faith appears at this moment to be not entirely foolish.

Another way to look at this is to think back on the story in today’s paper of Iraqis coming as far as 900 miles to register in Nashville, only to have to come back another 900 miles in two weeks to vote. And think about their hopeful and relaxed attitude. One can draw two obvious conclusions. First, the Iraqi insurgency is extremely weak in the Iraqi community in the United States, so weak as to hardly make their opposition to the election known. Second, the international “enemy”, the al-Qaida that does have its supporters in Iraq has not been able to make much progress in extending its operations to this country. There is still the possibility of a couple of al-Qaida spectaculars in America (the inauguration is an obvious time of danger), but even if these are brought off, the American public can be reassured by the easy-going confidence of the Iraqis amongst us that the country is not a honeycomb of Islamic cells planning our destruction. If they are here, they are few and scattered, with limited long-term capacity.

In North Carolina, General Vines is training 10,000 military advisors for Iraq. He wants to teach them about Islam, and so has assembled a group of books that they are all to read before they leave. Unfortunately, among these books is Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Huntington is a well-known Harvard professor and his recent work in this area has led to a great deal of commentary. The General certainly cannot be faulted for assigning such a book. However, assigning it is misguided, and along with a number of other recent writings by those who claim to be knowledgeable on Islam and what we are facing is likely to have a pernicious effect — particularly because of its Harvard origin.

In the book, Huntington predicted that the 21st century would be characterized by violent struggle between the civilization that had dominated the 20th century and those that were now rising up to challenge it. He particularly saw the Sinic and the Islamic as potential foes. Wars between Western Civilization and Islam, for example, were seen as all but inevitable. His predictions regarding the struggle of Western and Islamic civilizations has particularly struck observers because of the events of the last few years.

The problems with the Huntington analysis are many. First, "a civilization" is an arbitrary category difficult to define in space or time. The term was developed primarily to apply to ancient civilizations that at least had the terminological advantage of being separated more clearly in space and time than is the case today. Secondly, Huntington reads history in terms of the struggle of civilizations. A better way to read history would be to recognize that most wars were actually within civilizations, or along the periphery of civilizations against less civilized peoples (for example the story of how "the West" represented primarily by Rome moved northward to incorporate the British Isles and Scandinavia into its sphere). World Wars I, for example, was primarily within Western Civilization, with the rest of the world bit players. Third, at any one time, the peoples that are loosely lumped together as belonging to civilization X or Y are often quite diverse, speaking a variety of languages, believing in a variety of religions, and living on many different economic levels. Fourth, whatever may have been the situation in the past, today the leading sectors of all so-called civilizations are actually living more within the confines and assumptions of Western Civilization than those of their own. Paul, the manager of Hotel Rwanda, for example, did not take part in the massacre of Tutsis because he had culturally moved beyond that level. To him the calls to action by the radical Hutus were nothing but dangerous nonsense. People such as Paul are much more common in leading circles outside central Africa than they were in Rwanda. The leaders of many Muslim states are Muslims in little more than name. They hold on to their traditions just as many educated Christians or Hindus hold on to their traditions. But these traditions are not determinative of their actions in the real world. Even in Iran, a country often held up as an example of an implacable enemy, recent visitors find that the people in the street are more pro-American than anti-American. Certainly the lives they lead would be unrecognizable to the Ayatollah Khomeini. In Iraq, our main enemies are actually former Baath officers, representing a distinctly secular and anti-religious movement that only uses Islamic slogans to gain nationalistic support. The Kurds are under secular leadership. Surprisingly, the Shiites that are our best allies in the run-up to the election are also the community in Iraq with the best religious credentials.

This being the case, we should not be letting our soldiers be indoctrinated with the idea that Muslims are irrevocably against us by virtue of the fact they belong to another "civilization". Kipling said in another age that "never the twain shall meet", but in our age, they are meeting, they are living together, they are moving to America, becoming professionals, establishing relations with their relatives in Iraq. The vast majority of Muslims everywhere are individuals, pursuing individual goals, moving about, getting connected, going on line, and spending very little time thinking about how to destroy Americans.

The fact there is an al-Qaida that does want to attack us because they think we interfere too much in Islamic countries must be recognized and dealt with. We should realize there are many people who have adopted their ideas. But if we consider how little has really happened in the United States since 9/11, we might begin to appreciate the fact that the millions of Muslims in this country, even when mistreated by overzealous immigration and security personnel, are not about to sign up for a holy war. Some no doubt are, but so few that Bin Ladin has been unable to put them together long enough to carry out the continual series of attacks that he has promised and that alone should change the way we approach the world.

After seeing "Hotel Rwanda" yesterday I was reminded of the situation of the Sunni Arabs in Iraq. With not more than 20% of the population, they have traditionally been the rulers of the area, a position magnified by Saddam Hussein, especially after the Gulf War. The assumption is that with the upcoming election the Sunni Arabs will lose this preeminence; the Shi'as are set to play the major role in the future. Given this judgment, the continuing violence of the Sunni Arab community (both Jihadist and secular Baath) would seem to be a hopeless attempt to reverse history. The Sunni Arabs do not see it that way, and there are many historical reasons not to agree with them.

Rwanda was traditionally ruled by the Tutsi with about 14% of the population. They ruled over the other 85% who were classified as Hutu. Supposedly the Belgian colonialists benefited through accepting this arrangement, but it is an error to imagine they created it. In 1959, three years before formal independence from Belgium, the Hutus revolted, killing and displacing Hutus. When Rwanda became independent, it was easy for them to cement their ascendancy through elections. During the next 30 years, they continued to press their advantage, killing thousands of Tutsi and driving hundreds of thousands out. By 1990, Paul Kagame had organized Tutsi refugees in Uganda into an army and invaded Rwanda. Peace agreements held for a few months, but they were followed by renewed hostilities in 1991 and 1992. A more enduring peace was then bartered with the help of a small U.N. force. Yet during the next two years Hutu extremists organized thousands into popular militias and instigated a hate campaign on the premise that all Tutsi deserved to be killed. They used the radio to help organize and recruit adherents. Then in 1994, the death of the Hutu President in a plane crash was blamed by the extremists on the Tutsi. This was used as an excuse to start a well-planned extermination campaign that between April and July 1994 killed over 800,000 Tutsi, as well as many thousand Hutu "traitors". This genocide led the Tutsi refugee army along the border to start a new offensive. In a couple of months they had conquered the country and driven out the army and the Hutu militia along with two million civilian Hutus (most of whom have since returned). Paul Kagame and his party easily won elections in 2000 and 2003, which I doubt were free and fair. But why should they be? They no doubt feel they have earned the right to once again rule over the Hutu.

The lesson I take from this is that popular majorities, such as the Shi'a, even when they are able to organize militias such as al-Sadr's "Mahdi Army", may be no match for more highly motivated, organized, and confident majorities such as the Sunni Arab community. Leading a few thousand people who believed they have the right to rule and are used to ruling, Paul Kagame was able to overcome a much larger majority community with both a national army and a large militia. The Sunni Arabs on the basis of their actions against American and Iraqi governmental forces may well be another minority community that cannot be denied (unless we stay permanently). It is true that they will be largely shut out in the upcoming election. But the leaders of the resistance know that and welcome it. They know that democracy is not the route that they can take to reestablish their community's power. It is rather through the better organization and institutionalization of their community that they can once more rise to the top. They may have a good shot at success.

In yesterday's paper, William Powers writes that the failure of the Liberian state offers an opportunity for the international community to mount a long-term assistance program for Liberia at the same time that it permanently preserves the country's unique biological heritage. Most of the world has not realized it, but because of the lack of development, and in spite of the continual fighting among a collection of armed groups, governmental or otherwise, Liberia has managed to preserve a valuable stretch of West African rain forest.

Under his "Peace for Nature" solution (based on the more modest "debt for nature" approach that has been used in several countries), Liberia would agree to convert a large part of the country into a United Nations biosphere reserve, zoned for both strict preservation and multiple use. This would mean a commitment of the international community to at least a 20-year stabilization program that would preserve the peace and educate the people in peace-loving ways. The idea is attractive, but seems naive as presented. If only it was this easy to bring peace to an area.

Yet, perhaps the idea can be built on. The world is facing a crisis of "failed states" that includes Haiti, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly "Congo", then Zaire). There are a number of other possible candidates for this appellation, particularly in Africa. Taking an "environmental imperatives" approach to "failed states" or states with apparently intractable economic or political problems offers opportunities for long-term coordinated international assistance that might otherwise be lacking. The problems that would be addressed by the international guarantors are of two quite different kinds. First, in states such as Liberia and Congo, the program would be based on establishing large, internationally protected conservation areas, with high-return development activities concentrated in relatively small areas (what in the suburbs we refer to as "clustering" or "conservation zoning"). Second, the whole of states such as Haiti and Nauru would be defined as "environmental reclamation areas". Here the international community as well as many international private agencies would undertake to rebuild the country environmentally, socially, and politically.

Two pieces on today’s Op-Ed page continue to hammer away at what the authors assume to be the foolishness of holding the election this month. The general argument believed by many in the American opposition (including unfortunately Brezezinski) see our policy misguided partly because they assume that it will inevitably lead to a theological state, possibly one dominated by Iran. For regular readers here, I do not need to argue this issue again: a Shiite controlled state is not necessarily a theocracy. I do, however, believe that the Kurds will not allow this to happen in any event. Their leaders are quite secularist and would find such a state cramping, even if not theological.

A more serious argument against moving doggedly ahead is put forward to Larry Diamond, an old friend who had a part in the early arrangements for a democracy program in Iraq. Larry believes that an essential mistake was the idea to have only one district with proportional voting. He claims that he and many fellow experts on democracy opposed this. The decision came in part from the UN, but perhaps Bremer had a part in it. It was argued at the time that trying to divide the country into districts would be too time consuming and lead to too many political squabbles (which noticing what happens in the U.S. does not seem unlikely). There also was a desire by the Shi'a leadership to have many overseas voters, a desire hard to fulfill in a the country newly divided into geographical election districts.

What Diamond brings to the discussion that is new is the fact that many Sunni groups have been meeting regularly to develop a common strategy for getting the election postponed. One of their planks is to try to get the single district approach rescinded so that geographical representation based on districts might be instituted. They feel that if the election planners could do this, then after several months districts would have been created and voting could proceed district by district. In this case, the Sunni districts would receive the representation that the government records would show that they should get and not the representation given by a light vote. (That is, if Baghdad had 20% of the population but only 10% of the vote, it would still receive representation as though it had 20% of the vote with the geographical district approach.) He claims that the main Sunni leaders have agreed that if the voting is postponed for a few months and the districts established, then they will rescind their call for a boycott of the election. If all this is true, he makes a good case. Now we have to see if Allawi or the Americans currently calling the shots (pardon the expression) in Iraq will listen.

The interviews with the two French journalists who were held for several months by the Islamic Army of Iraq is enlightening. They seem to be a mixed group of Baathists, former army and Jihadists with some training in Afghanistan. They claimed they were not the same group as Zarqawi's, but that they worked with them at times. The reporters noted that their captors seem well supplied with both money and weapons. They were amazed at how easily their captors seemed to be able to move through the countryside and towns both north and south of Baghdad. They were not all bin Ladenists, but some were. And their objectives are similar to his, except for the particular Iraqi aspects. Their captives saw bin Laden as wanting to overthrow the Egyptian and Saudi regimes, defeat the Americans in Iraq, drive a wedge between the United States and Europe, recreate an Arab Caliphate (remember the last Caliphate was actually Turkish), and carry out a long-term war with the West, but a war seen as essentially defensive.

This morning's paper tells us that 325 non-Iraqis have been captured in Iraq. It goes on to say that these persons are not considered by the American Government to be "protected persons" under the Geneva Conventions. It is proposed and assumed that they will be warehoused in yet another Guantanamo-like detention facility. Leaving aside the torture and mistreatment that has been reported at these facilities, the continuation of the Guantanamo approach leads to some alarming consequences. (For readers who wish to go into this discussion at greater length, consider the following excellent discussion produced by the International Committee of the Red Cross.)

The United States is playing fast and loose with the definitions and standards that have been developed through the Geneva Conventions and international practice. In fact, there is no category of persons that are assumed by the Conventions to be completely "not protected". What has been done is suggest that there are no protections for captured persons who are not engaged in lawful combat but yet acting against our interests in a war situation. These include spies, military or not, civilians casually attacking our forces or interests, or combatants not in uniform or under the organized control of an opposing army. A lawful combatant is one fighting us in a normal military situation. An unlawful combatant is one attacking us outside those parameters. The Geneva Conventions do assume that an unlawful combatant is not imprisoned in the same manner as a regular soldier. His care is not subject to the same standards. And, unlike a normal Prisoner of war", he is subject to trial for his actions, often a military trial. During World War II, the United States captured some German saboteurs landed by a Uboat. They were tried and executed. The Supreme Court affirmed our right to do so, and it is this precedent that has been used to justify recent governmental actions against unlawful warriors.

There are two problems with the approach. First, because the persons captured are not regular prisoners of war, international law does not thereby give us carte blanche to do anything we wish. International rules against torture and the mistreatment of persons in custody still apply. Second, persons detained outside the normal rules for prisoners of war have the right to a trial. There is no right to indefinite incarceration without trial in either American or international law.

The American government argues that in a world of terrorists, the whole world is the battlefield. Therefore, it would be most imprudent to allow persons suspected of being terrorists back onto this new field of battle. There is some justice in this argument. Yet it conflicts with the opinion of much of the watching world that believes that persons innocent of any provable violent actions should not be jailed indefinitely without access to lawyers and due process. The fact that the U.S. government appears to agree with this position if the person is an American citizen appears to support the international view. American citizens in Guantanamo are being given lawyers and trials, if slowly and reluctantly.

In spite of the antipathy of the Administration and, unfortunately, a large part of the American public, to international institutions, the eventual solution to this problem must come through the development of international means of processing the cases of these persons. This may require a new kind of court and new kinds of international detention facilities. It may also mean that some persons are let out into the world to commit more mayhem. But our system of justice allows this to happen frequently with those processed by our courts. And the alternative of not treating this running sore in international relations, and maintaining ever-growing facilities incarcerating persons whose crimes have never been adjudicated, may be a much worse alternative.

Whatever happens, the opponents of American policy in this regard, whether domestic or foreign, need to get beyond just criticizing what is occurring and start working toward a resolution of what is a real problem.

In today’s Op-Ed, Thomas Friedman takes a highly realistic, but somewhat questionable view of what we are about in Iraq. He essentially says that the freedom we are bringing the Iraqis is the freedom to kill one another if they wish to. He argues that what we have now is Iraq is a civil war. Essentially our job now is to get through the election so that we might transfer the full job of fighting the civil war to the Iraqis where it belongs. If the Iraqis cannot put together a civil compact that will allow them to end the war, then God help them. We do not have the responsibility of staying until they are up to the task — which may be never.

Friedman asks "What kind of a majority are the Iraqi Shiites ready to be — a tolerant and inclusive one, or an intolerant and exclusive one? What kind of a minority do the Iraqi Sunnis intend to be — rebellious and separatist, or loyal and sharing?" Unfortunately, these questions already have their answers. Neither side, nor the Kurds to the side, will be all that idealistic. If we rely on their kindness and good faith, the game is lost. How they will view the pros and cons of not so promising alternatives is another matter, one that Friedman does not go into.

But this raises the question again, "By What Right Did We Launch This War"? If as Friedman says, the Iraqis did not want liberation in our sense, and if we cannot make them want it, then what was a achievable goal that made the war worth it to the Iraqi people and the Americans? Yes, Saddam was terrible. He killed lots of Iraqis, he held them down. But within this shell many lived reasonably successful lives. We had it in our power to keep Saddam away from weapons of mass destruction and improving marginally the standard of living of average Iraqis. It would have cost less for all concerned. We should make these calculations again when we are faced with a similar temptation to end tyranny. (By the way, I believe life in North Korea is a good deal worse than that in Saddam's Iraq. So here we go again. . . )

The discussion of the apparent ability of the Republican Party in the last election to capture the “values” issue has confused and alarmed many democrats. Slowly most Democrats are coming to realize that in fact the election was not won on the basis of the adherence of voter’s to “family values”. It probably had much more to do with a perception that George W. Bush was more of a leader. (Now, dear Democratic reader, set aside your own visceral reactions to the President. The important issue here is what the average voter thought. Bush seemed more decisive. So he makes mistakes, but don’t we all.) In fact, in state and local elections the Democrats came out slightly ahead of the Republicans.

What is most curious about the discussion is this insistence on the importance of “family values” when speaking within a political context. As far as politics are concerned, the important values are not family, but “community” or “civil”. Those involved in political affairs at the national level have traditionally assumed that the issues appropriate to families are within the purview of individuals or families, and are most appropriately dealt with there. When these values are not up to the task of socializing successive generations, then there is a network of personal or family counselors, religious or secular, to help define and instill family values that alone make this process succeed.

To turn to the issues of Iraq and Afghanistan on which this blog has concentrated, the problem is not that the Iraqis or Afghanis have insufficiently developed “family values”. What they lack is a sense of responsibility and commitment to wider national communities. We will help in these countries in so far as we assist in the development of community and civil values, even sometimes at the expense of family values.

Political systems exist because there is a need for a mechanism or institution to deal with common issues that go beyond what individuals and families can do acting separately. This concept that there is a higher community interest is what makes it imperative that all people pay their taxes, vote in elections, respect the laws of their community and nation, and serve on juries when called upon. It is also imperative that the community, or in the large, the nation-state, considerable the welfare of all its members, all its citizens, and when they see they are in need of better security, better health services, or better schools, that they pool together community resources to provide these. In recent years, this common responsibility, this set of community values, has been most commonly espoused by the Democratic Party. This is why this is the party that believes in the strengthening of welfare, educational, environmental, and health systems that benefit all people and all generations — even if this requires repealing tax cuts, thereby increasing over the short-term the “pain” of a few.

When the nation-state is no longer the appropriate institution to deal with issues that transcend its borders, then other mechanisms and institutions must be developed to deal with issues on the trans-national level. That is why we have the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations, and a plethora of other international bodies. These are imperfect institutions, but they are increasingly necessary institutions, and the development of more encompassing community and civil values are the only ways in which we will as the human community be able eventually to make these institutions serve the purposes of all. This is why the Democratic Party believes that the United States should play a responsible leadership role in the growth of the institutions of the World Community, even if this means compromising at times the absolute sovereignty of the American state.

Much of what is said here would not go over well with all constituencies in the United States. But it is the responsibility of Democrats to define what they stand for, to define the values that lie behind the policies they applaud. Only then can they embark on the great educational effort that any campaign, political or otherwise, requires.

There are again many discussions of the fact that violence is not abating as the elections come nearer. Violence directed at all those involved with or guarding the election process seems actually to be increasing in intensity in the Sunni Arab areas. Iraq’s President has discussed the possibility of postponement; the defense Minister has talked of it in Cairo; the Prime Minister even spent time on the phone with Bush discussing the problem. It is hard for the Americans to allow a delay as long as the Ayatollah Sistani says no. What the Americans face is that they now have the Kurds and most of the Shi’a on their side, and these groups, particularly the Shi’a leadership, are counting on the January elections giving them control of the country. Even a follower of Muqtada al-Sadr in Sadr City is now campaigning for a new ticket that will support al-Sadr’s cause if elected (this in addition to the twenty or so Sadrites already have on the list of the more general Shi’a establishment). Delay, and we may begin losing them. Hold the election, and we will at least look good to this large “constituency”.

The problem with delay is that a short delay is unlikely to change the situation very much. On the other hand, a long delay would reinforce the idea that we are simply an occupying power, that we have no intention of actually leaving. This idea would be easy to sell in the already anti-American Sunni Arab world, and might start being believed elsewhere as well. Meantime, the Coalition determination to stay no matter what would be weaken as time passed. What, then, could be done to make a short delay more useful?

Perhaps the place to start would be to make a much greater effort to seal the border with Syria while at the same time putting more pressure on Syria to stop the movement of men, materiel, and money into Iraq. The Syrian government might even be encouraged to arrest or expel some of the Iraqi Baath leaders in Syria that are maintaining the violence. Another approach would be to allow Shi’a militias to be reactivated. These could be used to guard main thoroughfares and squares in Baghdad, as well as being deployed along major transportation arteries. They could be paid for their efforts: in the past they have consisted largely of unemployed young men. Of course, they would not be the best of troops. But they might do as well as, and be able to supplement usefully, the police forces that are now the weakest reed in the election protection effort. These two measures, along with the already occurring increase in American forces, could conceivably bring the violence down immediately before and during an election held in April instead of January.

Today’s paper points again to the extreme difficulty of controlling opium production in Afghanistan. The country has now become the leading producer of opium in the world. Only three percent of its irrigated land actually produces opium, but return from this crop can be as much as thirty times that of wheat, the traditional crop. The results are what we have noted in many other hard drug producing countries, particularly in South America. In Colombia, drug production and the drug trade have made impossible the institutionalization of democracy and the “freeing” of the country as far as the majority of the rural people are concerned.

The drug trade in Afghanistan has produced hundreds if not thousands of instantly wealthy persons, and provided them with armed retinues. In the province on the southwestern tip of the country discussed in today’s paper, the whole economy has been essentially taken over. The trade here is primarily through Iran into Europe. The Iranians are doing their best. They have financed the building of many Afghan police stations on the border to help. But whatever successes the control programs have, the drugs keep coming. The warlords controlling much of the country outside the cities are financed in large part by drugs. And as fast as drug/war lord is replaced or removed others take his place. Kabul has said that it will move energetically against the trade. With the help of the British they are eradicating crops and arresting growers and traders. The problem is that facing hunger, eradication makes more enemies than friends, both for foreigners and the government.

Out of a population of 30,000,000, nearly 80% live an essentially subsistence existence in rural areas (perhaps 2,000,000 of these are still refugees, primarily in Pakistan, but most will return to rural areas). Twelve percent of the country is listed as “arable”, but much of this has returned to desert in recent years due to overgrazing, erosion, and drought. The average rainfall is twelve inches. Dry farming with this rainfall at this level on rocky soils often fails. Small irrigated patches along creek beds provide the major sustenance. Only three percent of the country remains forested. An agricultural revival program is being pursued with foreign assistance, irrigation channels are being reopened. More of this should be done. But for most Afghans it won’t be enough to give them a living even in spare Afghan terms.

We must come up with an approach that does more than eradicate opium or try to force people back into growing cotton or subsistence crops. The first fact that must be faced is that most rural Afghans do not have enough land to support themselves in an average year raising food crops. They need a cash crop to make it through the hard years. Second, Afghanistan does not have enough water or arable land (nor a good enough transportation system nor viable potential markets) to make possible another cash crop with anything like the return of opium. The solution for Afghanistan must come through a rapid change from a barely functioning rural subsistence economy to a rural economy based on small manufacturing (as a first step to an eventual change from a rural to an urban society). This is obviously easier said than done. But the Afghan government and its friends should not keep butting their heads against the geographical facts of the country. If we were not so enamored of a free trade regime that transfers production from the wealthy countries primarily to China, we could conceive of ways to guarantee markets for certain chosen items for, let us say rural Colombians and Afghans, with the European Community, Russia, and the United States buying predetermined amounts of what is produced. We then could invest in getting such production started and building the required infrastructure. (The next job is to figure out what production might be viable.)

Today’s Times brings back the discussion of the Kurdish independence movement in Iraq. It describes the three largely Kurdish provinces of Iraq’s northeast, governed by the Kurdish Regional Government, as to all intents and purposes an independent country. They have been independent in one way or another since 1991 and today are more unified and stronger than ever. Their security forces are the most effective non-coalition forces in the country. They have managed to preserve near total exemption from the violence in the rest of the country. Investment is pouring in, especially from overseas Kurds, but also from Turkey. The reporter said that he saw very few flags of Iraq but Kurdish flags were everywhere. It is a largely secular society with a booming economy. A new luxury hotel is going up in the capital, Erbil.

Kurdish leaders speak of the desire of the Kurds to remain in Iraq in a loose federal system. But one gets the impression that this is just the diplomatic discourse of leaders who know that the United States is unlikely to accept greater demands. The attitude and behavior of the people suggests they will accept little less than effective independence. Meanwhile, these same leaders are demanding that Kirkuk, an important city because of its surrounding oil fields, be turned over to them. They speak of the need to have an accepted right to the oil resources of the region, a right that the defense minister for the regional government says would allow them to triple the size of their forces (to 240,000!). At least 100,000 Arabs have been driven out of the Kirkuk area by the Kurds since the defeat of Saddam. This was simply payback for a Saddam expulsion of Kurds in the recent past. Kurds are reoccupying their old houses and lands. But it has generated a resettlement problem.

The flash point could come very soon. In the U.S.-initiated constitution that Iraq lives by now, the Kurds are guaranteed a right to veto any provisions they do not like (such as reducing their autonomy). But the Shiites have suggested that these rules cannot last beyond the January election. They have indicated they want a country at long last that they will rule and the Kurds must stay in it. The United States and other powers, near and far, have indicated there should be Kurdish autonomy, but this seems in the words of Condoleezza Rice and others to be more like the autonomy of California than what the Kurds have in mind.

But what do the Kurds have in mind? There is no example that I know of in the world that really fits their idea of autonomy. We could look at Albania and Montenegro in Yugoslavia/Serbia, but these hardly seem to be viable examples. A better example, ironically, might be Taiwan, a country that the world has decided to treat as part of China, but is able to maintain itself as an independent state in spite of that. What the Kurds, sheltered behind a seasoned and successful armed force of their own, and with enough money to maintain it, seem unlikely to accept is a country “occupied” by a largely Arab army answerable to Baghdad.

Ambassador Galbraith, a person who has worked with the Kurds independently and for the American government for years, and served as Ambassador to Croatia after it separated from Yugoslavia advises us here to support an essentially autonomous Kurdistan, covering it with the fig leaf of federalism. He argues that geographically separate and distinct peoples cannot be forced to live together in a unified state, a fact he says he found out in Yugoslavia. Yes, we all found it out. But where does that leave federalism? He appears in his heart to want Kurdish independence, but he believes the unwillingness of Turkey, Iran, and Turkey, all with large Kurdish minorities striving for autonomy, to accept true Kurdish independence makes the achievement of anything more than a very limited autonomy impossible. The long and bitter Kurdish struggle in Turkey had its roots in a communist movement, and has resulted in extreme violence on both sides. The Turkish army is naturally apprehensive about an independent Kurdistan. In Iran, the short-lived Kurdish Mahabad Republic after World War II was briefly supported by the USSR. Their leadership was essentially nationalists and tribal; their leaders were from the same family that rules in half of Iraq's Kurdistan today. There does not seem to be a strong nationalist movement in Iranian Kurdistan now, but the population is Sunni and is apparently quite opposed to Shi'a rule from Tehran. An independent Kurdistan in Iraq could be a spark that could blow apart the current regime in Iran.

Some parting thoughts. The outside world overwhelmingly accepts the idea that the Kurds should not be allowed to secede from Iraq. One small chink in the armor is an Australian Senator who argues for complete independence. It must also encourage the Kurds to find that Turkish companies have been more than willing to engage in the reconstruction of the country. On this front, the Kurdish leadership has been most accommodating, resisting any idea that they would help the struggle of the Kurds in Turkey for independence. On the other hand, there is a large Kurdish population in Mosul, a city now partially occupied by Kurdish forces but outside the area they normally claim, and perhaps a million Kurds continue to live in Baghdad. In any messy breakup of the country Kurds outside Kurdistan could suffer, or at least there could be large population exchanges.

My feeling is that the United States should think long and hard about supporting an independent homeland for the Kurds. We have supported the independence of Israel under much more doubtful circumstances, and we have come to feel that Israel is our only true ally in the region. Kurdistan and the Kurds, if we stay by them and do not abandon them again, could become another long-term ally in the region. Of course, we have our eye on the larger prize of a stable, pro-American, democratic Iraq. Maybe so. But in the pursuit of this dream, we should not lose site of the current reality of a secular Kurdistan that wants to be in our corner.

The juxtaposition of initiating an open-ended war without adequate international support in Iraq and the cutting of taxes while the deficit and trade balance were carrying the country toward a fiscal cliff led me about a year ago to recommend that we place a surcharge on the U.S. income tax. This would have the double effect of reducing our fiscal haemorrhaging while making all Americans feel a part of what was going on in the Middle East. To me there was an eerie sense that we were hiring the young to go off and risk their lives while most Americans went on “living it up”. The Indian Ocean Tsunami seems to me to have some of the same urgency about it. If we as a country are serious about helping the millions of people affected around the Indian Ocean, then we should be willing to act as a community, a community in which all contribute, to help those who need assistance in the short or long term. It would do the Americans good to have it announced that a surcharge would be placed on this year’s income tax for all Americans. All the money raised by this surcharge would be used to replace the money needed now to help the affected people. We need to have symbolic gestures like this to make us all realize we are one people united in serving not just our own pleasures but the greater world around us. The gesture might also improve our reputation as a people, especially if placing such special occasion surcharges on the income tax were to become a standard part of American tax policy.

Last night Zbigniew Brezezinski, one of my personal heroes, was interviewed on the Lehrer show as to what he thought was going to happen in Iraq. Unfortunately, he seemed to have it all wrong. First, he thought that there was little chance that a successful election could be held under the circumstances. Second, he thought that the system that emerged if the process went forward would be a theocracy that would be a long way from being a democracy. Walter Russell Mead, another foreign policy expert that sat with him demurred. He said, rightly, that the situation was more hopeful and that it was unlikely that the Shiites would set up anything like what they had in Iran. The fact is that the doubters, the good guys that opposed the war, have allowed their opposition to get in the way of their judgment. The bloody mess is just that. But it does not mean that it is hopeless. It may well be that Iraqis have become so inured to killing over the last generation that their response to the daily toll in their country is not as overwhekming as it would be for more fortunate or pampered Americans. It certainly does not mean that we are fighting Islam in Iraq, in a version of Sam Huntington’s war of civilizations (a common belief of many pundits), nor that the bad guys will necessarily win. What it does mean is that a lot of blood is yet to be spilled.

Today’s paper has a fascinating piece on the reactions of minorities in northeast Syria to the chance for democracy in Iraq. Minorities in this case mean Armenians, Assyrian Christians, and Kurds. It even included repressed political minorities such as the communists (what an irony that they should be looking to us to bail them out). The reporter was amazed at the optimism of their leaders. What they saw was a chance for democracy not only in Iraq, but in Syria as well. They believed that events in Iraq had already started to weaken the controls they have been living under. (Remember that the other branch of the Baath party has been in control of Syria for more than a generation now.) The goals of these leaders are quite different. The Kurds are rejoicing in what they see as a chance for an autonomous Kurdistan. There has already been dancing in the streets for this goal (suppressed of course by the police). The Christian groups, on the other hand, see the possibility for a more democratic Syria in which they would have something more like equality than what they have had.

At this point, it is only a dream, a spark likely to be extinguished. But it does show that the ideological team behind Bush, with its dream of a democratic Middle East emerging from Iraq, is not as foolish as most regional and foreign policy experts here and abroad have believed. Of course, there is still a long way to go.

On a sober-sided talk show the other day, a retired military officer was interviewed on the subject of how long we would be in Iraq. His answer was that it would be ten or fifteen years before our soldiers could leave. The argument was that the violence was simply not going down and the Iraqis we were training showed no signs of being able to pick up the slack. This argument has three possible bases.

(1) A lack of understanding of the war. The authority has not yet realized the extent to which the insurgency in Iraq is a response to the presence of foreign troops as much as to any other factor. He also has no concept of the extent to which the American population is tired of the war and is bound to grow increasingly tired if the promised elections lead to no change in our commitment.

(2) A confusion of the war in Iraq with the war against al-Qaida. The authority believes firmly that what we are fighting is primarily a Islamic Jihadist movement aimed at the United States. This being the case Iraq is just as good a place to engage the enemy as any other.

(3) Imperialist dreams. The authority is really entranced by the idea that we need to establish at least a semi-permanent base in the Middle East from which we can coerce the entire area while we convert the area through force and persuasion the area to democracy.

The fact is we are fighting a well financed Iraqi nationalist and Sunni Arab insurgency. This being the case, one of the primarily preconditions for ending the insurgency is the withdrawal of American forces. This may not end the insurgency, but without it, there is no way to end it. Accepting this analysis, once the Americans leave, the Kurds and Shi’as will have to work out a modus vivendi with these Baath forces or continue an endless fight against them. The eventual answer may be a de facto or de jure splitting up of the country, Yugoslavia style. In either case, we should not see preventing this or solving these relationships as our problem. (Many in the world may say “You broke it, you fix it”. But I do not think most Iraqis will feel this way. They want once again to be the decisive force in their country.) These are Iraqi problems and we should encourage them, possibly with international assistance, to solve them.

The United States will never recapture its role as the last resort for the preservation of world peace as long as it is identified with Iraq and our forces are tied down there. The American people are only prepared to do so much. And with a commitment anything like that we have today in Iraq, we are neither able to defend adequately our interests nor world interests in the many hot spots that fizz and bubble around the world.

If we have not already begun the process, we should begin talks with the political leaders of Iraq (and this includes the Ayatollah Sistani in spite of his disclaimers) about a time table for our orderly withdrawal. We should complete the training of Iraqi forces now in the pipeline and improve the performance of forces already “trained”, but then let them take over as we withdraw. The new parliament will write a constitution. By the time that is completed toward the end of 2005, we should announce victory and retire.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies in one of its latest releases characterizes recent American steps, such as the invasion of Iraq, as well as its one-sided Middle Eastern policy more generally, as helping the al-Qaida recruitment (supporting the thesis of Scheuer recently discussed in this blog). Iraq may well be seen in retrospect to have been a valuable proving ground for Jihadists if they later fan out over the world in pursuit of globalist objectives. However, the report also points out that the ideology and focus of al-Qaida appears to be in flux. They have some positives, but also negatives. They are dispersed more than they were and seem to be less under the direction of the center. Many of the groups that work with al-Qaida, for example in Southeast Asia, have reason to work with it tactically, but they do not have the global goals of the parent organization. This has two implications. First, such groups can be dealt with on a bargaining basis. Second, they are unlikely to be interested in using weapons of mass destruction.

The report believes that efforts against al-Qaida have reduced its effectiveness in the short run. However, in the longer run it sees the need for a change in U.S. policies that will make it less possible for al-Qaida to picture the West as an eternal enemy of Islam (again Scheuer's thesis). This needed change is referred to as moving toward more emphasis on "soft power" rather than "hard" (this is not an argument Scheuer would make).

As I have referenced several times, Professor Juan Cole at Michigan offers perhaps the most informed and useful blog on the Iraq war from an academic viewpoint. He knows Iraq well, particularly the history of its Shi'a community.

It is encouraging to find that his most recent posts seem to have a different tone from those earlier in the year. He is more friendly and supportive of the American effort than he has been in the past. Reading on, this seems to reflect the decision by the overwhelming majority of the Iraqi Shiites to support the electoral process. He is scathing in his denunciation of the statement by Khomenei of Iran that the Americans and the Israelis were behind the attacks in Najaf and Kerbala. He points out once again that the Iraqi Shiites are uninterested in such statements. They are Iraqis and do not take kindly to outside Iranian interference. It is his thought that the insurgency has all along been primarily a Baathist effort, and that the attacks in the holy cities should also be ascribed to the Baathists. These attacks were, incidentally, also denounced by the leading Sunni clerics association.

Cole remains bothered that there is too much violence for the elections to be held in January. If large numbers of Sunni Arabs voters are kept away from the polls, this will make any constitution that came out of the process suspect in the eyes of many. However, unlike the New York Times which in its recent editorial called again for a postponement in view of our evident inability to control the violence, Cole believes this has to be balanced against the strong support of the Kurds and Shiites for having the elections as soon as possible. As he says, "the U.S. has to make the Shi'a community happy". The growing closeness of the U.S. and the Shi'a is suggested by the following note: "The U.S. has been fighting Sunni Arab guerrillas in Babil province to stop their attacks on Shiite locals and pilgrims, an action warmly supported by Iraqi vice president Ibrahim Jaafari and other Shiite leaders."

Cole repeats a discussion with the Iraqi education ministry. Apparently the situation has improved quite a bit. Many Baathists who were formerly excluded from teaching are now back teaching again while a number of non-Baathists who excluded from teaching by the Baathists under Saddam are also now teaching. Many schools have been repaired and new ones are being built. There are 6 million students and 370,000 teachers, giving an overall ratio of 19/1, although some schools are still in want of teachers.

In the international relations area, the Jordanian and Egyptian foreign ministers are warning Iraq against the possibility of a sectarian state, while Iran has closed its borders because it thinks Iraq is too dangerous for pilgrims!

Do not misunderstand. Cole is still very down on the war, how it has been initiated, and how it is being carried on (he even has a note on where one can contribute clothing for our soldiers in Iraq). He points out the dangers. The chief one being that the Shiite leaders will not be able to continue to restrain their followers from striking back at the Sunni Arabs, thus inviting a more thorough explosion. He also points out the danger that Saudi Arabia will be hit with more attacks by al-Qaida, particularly of its oil lines. This may become particularly serious when a generation of battle-hardened Jihadists return from Iraq if and when things quiet down there.

Sunday's Times gave a good summary of what might be described as the "order of battle" for the insurgents. The current estimate is that there are 11,000 to 20,000 insurgents. Of these 2200 to 3300 are hard core supporters of Saddam and the Baath Party. Many of the leaders are in Syria. They are assisted by 6100 to 10,000 part-time supporters. These are often paid on a per-job basis for their attacks. Their goal is a strong government recreating the authoritarian, Sunni-Arab, Baathists past. The Islamic extremists are mostly Salafists, persons with views similar to the Wahhabi, but not now identified with them. Perhaps 700 insurgents are aligned with al-Qaida and al-Zarqawi, mostly in the Mosul area. One of the main leaders here is Muhammad Sharkawa, formerly a member of Ansar. Perhaps 2000 other extremists or Jihadists operate separately from this structure. The Islamic extremists hope to ensure a weak government that will eventually be replaced by a Taliban type regime. American also estimate that there are 2900 in al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, mostly in Baghdad. It seems doubtful that these should be seen as part of the insurgency now.

Today's paper reported a terrible day yesterday, with more than 60 killed. The targets were ordinary Shi'a in Karbala and Najaf and election officials in Baghdad. It seems clear that the major focus has shifted to killing Shi'a, thereby kindling a sectarian war that they are sure they can win, and killing Iraqis connected with the election effort. An encouraging sign is the fact that the going price for getting a person to fire a grenade at Americans has gone up from $50 to $200. But in all these figures, what one does not get is where the suicide bombers are recruited. This seems now to be the main tool of the insurgents, a tool used mostly against Iraqis. The insurgent decisions to concentrate on Iraqis may have a short-term pay off, but in the longer term it would seem bound to reduce sympathy for their cause.

Th reader may also be interested in looking at the American forces order of battle. It is interesting to reflect that the Coalition forces taken together, and assisted by the newly trained and sometimes feckless Iraqi government forces add up to well over 200,000. Given the stardard 1:10 ratio said to be required when fighting a guerrilla war, this should be an adequate force if deployed intelligently.

One of the primary problems afflicting "our side" in Iraq is the difficulty we have in controlling the movement of insurgents. Unlike insurgents of the past, most of this movement is by car or light truck. One example of the seriousness of the problem is the report that the insurgents regularly pay Iraqis for making attacks with money that is brought in regularly from Syria (from which much of the war is directed). Another example is the report of two very destructive suicide vehicle attacks in Najaf and Karbala yesterday. The assumption seems to be that the vehicles involved came from the southern edge of the "Sunni Triangle". Without knowing what measures are in place or planned to control such movement, let me make a suggestion.

We control the air, and with few trees in Iraq and little cloud cover, we could regularly and effectively see from the air every vehicle in Iraq, stationary or in movement. The proposal is to require that every vehicle in Iraq be required to be (1) registered and (2) have on its roof in paint that can be seen at night the registration number. After a month period during which all vehicles would have to be registered and emblazoned with their registration numbers, air reconnaissance could start rapidly building a data base containing the location of every vehicle in the country. Once this database is established, planes patrolling over the country, and especially along the more important ways in from Syria and above the road systems of the "Sunni Triangle" could establish the location of every vehicle, updating this regularly whenever movement is noted. It should be possible to gin up a computer program to distinguish standard movements from suspicious, reporting the latter down to units on the ground that could then check suspected vehicles. The use of false identification could be reduced by continuous monitoring that was able to note any vehicles that had unrecorded numbers or duplicate numbers. Vehicles operating not in accord with the law would be subject to impoundment.

Critics might raise many objections. The suggestion is certainly in need of many refinements, especially those that experience would suggest. In any event, the system would obviously be perfected over time.

For the first few chapters I thought that Anonymous was just another self-important spook who wanted to tell the world how musch he knew and how wrong everyone else is. On, finishing the book I conclude that he is that, but that he is also much else. His thesis is wrong-headed in many respects, but it deserves being taken seriously.

A principal contention is that we are in a war with the Islamic world led by Ussama Bin Ladin. We need to recognize that this is a war and fight it with no holds barred. To Scheuer, this means a Sherman to the sea approach. We failed in Afghanistan evidently because we did not kill enough Afghanis. Only if we are absolutely unconcerned with the death of Americans and Muslims will we succeed in this bitter fight. To do otherwise, is to succumb to the weakneed pacifistic, internationalist lobby that enervates the country. This is a position that we must all understand, but reject. It is also a position many Americans hold, and that the interrogators that flaut the Geneva Conventions clearly hold.

He also argues that Bin Ladin should not thought of as a terrorist. He is a military and spiritual leader who has made clear his goals. he is not out to destroy our freedoms. he couldn’t care less. He made a consistent list of demands, including especially get out of the Middle East and stop supporting Israel as well as the non-Islamic tyrants that rule over Muslims in the area. He believes that Ussama is right that we have carried out an anti-slamic policy in the region and that we have been foolish to continue in this direction. But he says, we are a democracy, we can decide what policies our leaders folly in the area. Therefore, we are as a people behind the policies that both bin Ladin and Scheuer find abhorrent. In a sense, in his eyes, he is justified in attacking the twin towers, just as we would be justified in bombing Afghanistan back to the stone age (assuming it was not there already). This a position that I can agree with to a limited degree: our policies are a major case of what bin Ladin is attacking. In today’s news, for example, a new tape has bin Ladin calling for attacks on the Saudi leaders and the destruction of the oil fields in Saudi Arabia.

Where Anonymous goes most seriously wrong in where he believes himself to be most knowledgable: his understanding of Islam. He sees us loosing the war with Islam in Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact he sees Iraq as the greatest of gifts to bin Ladin. For it reinforces the idea that the “Crusaders” are out to destroy Islam. He notes that Bin Ladin refer continually to the responsibility of every Muslim to fight for God against the oppressor. He notes that Muslims cannot accept or understand the idea of a separation of the tate and church because in Islam they are the same. This is a correct reading of Islamic texts, but a misreading of history. In the year and a half I spent studying Islam I came to realize the great gulf between the theoretical Islamic world and the real Islamic world. It is commonly supposed that the Ayatollah Khomeini was reestablishing a true Islamic state with his concept of the “Faqih” as the true ruler of the ‘Umma. However, what is remarkable in Islam is that Khomeini had almost no historical precedent. The mixed group of secular strong men, princes, and military leaders ruling Islamic countries today is much closer to the historical record of Islam. Islamic theorists have always reiled against the people in power as unislamic and they have had almost no effect. Regardless of how bloody minded the Muslim extremists are, and they also have had historical precendents such as the Assassins of the Middle Ages, they have seldom been able to win over the general population -- and it is quite likely they will fail again. For a fuller discussion of Scheuer’s book see the accompanying review.

In Spite of everything, movement toward the January election seems inexorable. I heard a military expert in Iraq today decrying the state of the war effort. Yet when asked whether the elections would take place, he said that they would take place on time, and suggested in passing that in 14 of 18 provinces there would be no serious problems. December 15 was the date on which the campaigning was to begin. The final registration tallied 3500 candidates organized in 230 political groups that were themselves organized in nine alliances. All are competing for 275 seats in the national assembly to draft a final constitution. Allawi himself registered his alliance of six parties, the “Iraqi List” at the last minute. It is a secular Shiite-Sunni group composed of former Baath party members that is not expected to win many votes. It is remarkable that in an election run by Allawi with American backing, the expected outcome will not be his victory, as is the case in most such arrangements, but a parliament in which he will represent a marginal group, if represented at all. He was not able to combine his forces with those of Adnan Pachachi who registered separately as “the Iraqi Democratic Gathering”, again a secular group of Sunnis and Shi’as. Of course, the group overwhelmingly favored to win the most seats is the 22 party United Iraqi Alliance that brings together most of the Shiite groups. The old communist party, shattered by Saddam, has come together again with other leftist parties in a “Union of the People”. At the last minute, the United Nations is sending more people to help with the election. I note that Senator Bayh of Indiana, who is otherwise very critical of what is going on, is quite taken with the ability and optimism of the United Nations personnel.

There is a curious disjunction between much of the reporting on Iraq that concentrates on violence and the impossibility of having a meaningful election under these conditions and what seems to be happening regardless of the violence. Every day another Iraqi leader is attacked, often fatally, and more national guardsmen or police are killed. The most recent horror was in Karbala, in the heart of the relatively peaceful Shi’a area. It is almost as if Iraqis have become so inured to the violence and threat of violence that nothing can phase them. Of course, it is remarked that it is not expected that large campaign rallies can be a part of the process. More likely, campaigning will be through the use of the media, especially television. The extent to which television will be fairly available to the different factions is yet to be seen.

In Spite of everything, movement toward the January election seems inexorable. I heard a military expert in Iraq today decrying the state of the war effort. Yet when asked whether the elections would take place, he said that they would take place on time, and suggested in passing that in 14 of 18 provinces there would be no serious problems. December 15 was the date on which the campaigning was to begin. The final registration tallied 3500 candidates organized in 230 political groups that were themselves organized in nine alliances. All are competing for 275 seats in the national assembly to draft a final constitution. Allawi himself registered his alliance of six parties, the “Iraqi List” at the last minute. It is a secular Shiite-Sunni group composed of former Baath party members that is not expected to win many votes. It is remarkable that in an election run by Allawi with American backing, the expected outcome will not be his victory, as is the case in most such arrangements, but a parliament in which he will represent a marginal group, if represented at all. He was not able to combine his forces with those of Adnan Pachachi who registered separately as “the Iraqi Democratic Gathering”, again a secular group of Sunnis and Shi’as. Of course, the group overwhelmingly favored to win the most seats is the 22 party United Iraqi Alliance that brings together most of the Shiite groups. The old communist party, shattered by Saddam, has come together again with other leftist parties in a “Union of the People”. At the last minute, the United Nations is sending more people to help with the election. I note that Senator Bayh of Indiana, who is otherwise very critical of what is going on, is quite taken with the ability and optimism of the United Nations personnel.

There is a curious disjunction between much of the reporting on Iraq that concentrates on violence and the impossibility of having a meaningful election under these conditions and what seems to be happening regardless of the violence. Every day another Iraqi leader is attacked, often fatally, and more national guardsmen or police are killed. The most recent horror was in Karbala, in the heart of the relatively peaceful Shi’a area. It is almost as if Iraqis have become so inured to the violence and threat of violence that nothing can phase them. Of course, it is remarked that it is not expected that large campaign rallies can be a part of the process. More likely, campaigning will be through the use of the media, especially television. The extent to which television will be fairly available to the different factions is yet to be seen.

Two experts in the American security community, apparently with Iranian backgrounds, offer in today's Times an appraisal of the growing role of the Revolutionary Guards in the Iranian power structure. (Ironically, the Revolutionary Guards seem to have developed in parallel with the Republican Guards of Saddam Hussein. They serve much the same purpose: an elite military force with special responsibility for preserving the regime in power — in this case the ruling clergy of Iran.) Over the last fifteen years the Guards have gradually increased in number and equipment, and now have even their own navy. Making up about a third of the numbers of the regular army, they appear to be the most formidable force in the country. The Guards control the development of the missile programs and it is thought that the Guards are the ones guiding the development of nuclear weapons and opposing anything that would restrict this development. Their political power has been growing in tandem. Former members make up a third of the parliament elected this year. One of their leaders may run for President in the up-coming May election. And they oppose further development of the regular army. And like many armies in the less developed world, they have considerable business interests.

The conclusion of the analysts is that there are real and potential fissures between the Guards and their one-time creators, the establishment clergy, as well as between the Guards and the other armed services. They advise the United States to develop a "nuanced policy" that exploit these and other potential rifts.

The Shi'a coalition is back together apparently. Their new list, which includes Kurds and a few Sunnis, is referred to as "The Alliance". It has now ranked its list. Number 1 is al-Hakim, the leader of SCIRI, the mainline organization with Iranian connections — although it denies any such connection. Number 7 is Shahristani, a spokesman for Ayatollah Sistani. Chalabi is Number 10, a remarkable transformation for an exile (since 1958) who was the darling of the Pentagon before the war, then condemned, and later accused by the Interim government of crimes. Some Al-Sadr candidates are also in the top 25 positions. One can assume that Dawa leaders make up many of the others in this elite group. It is assumed that much of the government that will be established after the election will be made up of persons in the top 25.

Dr. Sharistani, the spokesman for the new Alliance at yesterday's press conference, showed the group's moderation by discussing for the first time in these circles the difficulty of holding an election in Sunni areas with violence at a high level. Suggestions are being made that perhaps there could be a rolling election in which the election in certain areas would be delayed while security forces are brought in temporarily. Another sign of moderation was the presence of Sunni Arabs and Kurds on the platform as the Alliance was announced. One of the seven persons on the platform was Fawaz al Jarba, who is a former Iraqi army major, a Sunni Arab, and leader of the Shamar tribe, one of the largest in Iraq.

Today's paper carries an Op-Ed by two experts on World War II's Office of Strategic Services (OSS) that was headed by William Donovan. Interested readers can find a somewhat fuller discussion on-line at this web site.

The main thrust of the argument is that intelligence was much more productive when it was run by a bunch of skilled amateurs who really had the goals of the effort in view, as contrasted with their personal advancement in a large bureaucratic organization. The OSS grew out of an effort by President Roosevelt to improve the foreign intelligence available to him at the beginning of World War II. Then, as now, intelligence was riven by many feuds among agencies, and none of them wanted to share their sources or power with upstarts. The FBI and the military service intelligence groups were the main culprits. Up to the end of the war, this new agency that was supposed to be handling intelligence gathering directly for the President was not granted access to information coming from the breaking of most Axis codes, it had no role in Latin America, and was largely frozen out of the Pacific Theatre of operations by the opposition of leading admirals. Nevertheless it persisted, and did good work developing working relations with the British. It also had a research and intelligence branch that recruited the best and the brightest from American universities, allowing the country to have a much better idea of the enemies they were facing. The OSS also developed an action unit that conducted a wide variety of secret operations behind enemy lines. At the end of the war, Truman was quick to dissolve OSS. Donovan had a poor reputation as an administrator, hated bureaucracy, and was personally disliked by Truman. Since Donovan relied so heavily on the Ivy League for his staff, it is possible that there was a cultural gap here as well (which continues today between the Midwest and Southwest and New England).

But what seems most useful today in thinking about how intelligence should be restructured goes back to the thirties when Roosevelt began to use Donovan as a personal "reporter" on what was going on in the world. He sent him to England to see how resilient they might be, and so forth. The reports back were directly to him. It seems to me that in the highly bureaucratized Washington of today with everyone with their own personal as well as ideological and national agendas, this model might be useful as a supplement. If a President could find a group of five or so persons of different political persuasions who would work silently for him throughout the world as his eyes and ears and personal advisors, he would be in a much improved position to make informed decisions. These advisors should be essentially nameless. They should either be beyond retirement age or have other professions they could easily go back to. One of their tasks should be to find out what people in the existing intelligence communities in this country and elsewhere "really think". They should be able to move comfortably through a variety of cultures and political systems, reporting back what they think is going on or likely to go on. They should be able to have informed opinions on the capabilities of action agencies or military services that might be enlisted in performing needed secret or nonsecret operations.

So much of the world continues to be convulsed by struggles for independence, freedom and rights. We see these struggles as struggles for "democracy", but that is more often our spin than that of the people involved. Frequently, "good government" and "security" are higher priorities than we might expect. But in the realm of individual opportunity, of individual lives rather than nationalistic romance there is a calculus that runs the other way, toward entrance to wider world rather than encasement in small independencies.

Yesterday's paper offers democratic and independent Armenia as an example of a people that "got what it wanted" and yet the people today do not feel they have what they wanted. Independent Armenia drifts. Young people feel trapped in an unimportant place without prospects. Many, young and old, look back to a time when they belonged to the Soviet Union, and they could look forward as individuals to playing a much more positive role in Moscow than they can now. They even treasure the fact that they were educated in Russian and could contribute to that culture. Many people in small European countries have had similar feelings as they emerged into independence. But now with the new Europe developing, their hope is in a new nationality and culture that transcends the limits of their small states. At least the new Europe helps. But Armenia has no such out. It is geographically trapped next to Georgia, another small country in a similar position, and Azerbaijan with which Armenians have little in common aside from mutual antipathy.

One can imagine that these same problems are apparent, or will be apparent, to many Iraqi Kurds as they consider their options. Many Kurds have participated in the larger Iraq society. Indeed, even now the foreign minister of the Interim Government is a Kurd. Yet Kurds want their freedom, their independence. Perhaps the solution would be for all the Kurds to carve out a greater Kurdistan, but this is an unlikely and dangerous perhaps.

One thinks of the dilemma of Taiwan. The Taiwanese are divided between those who developed a different culture with the help of the Japanese occupation in the first half of the twentieth century and those more purely Chinese who came from the mainland. To some degree these two regional cultures have melted together. Still, today, with the more purely Taiwanese in the majority the country strives for a future that is both Chinese and not Chinese. No longer do they see Taiwan as "China", with its aspiration to reclaim all of China (much as the Armenians dream of a greater Armenia and the Kurds of a greater Kurdistan). But now this ruling group strives for a separate state, a new country, with a different dialect and a different connection to the world. Unlike Armenians, and more like the Iraqi Kurds, the Taiwanese independence movement has little support from the outer world and faces a looming danger of invasion and absorption. If the United States were as dedicated to self-determination in our day as Wilson was in his, we would actively champion the Taiwanese independence movement, and perhaps even Tibetan and Uighur independence movements. Yet today we are more wedded to our relations with the great and looming China, for the sake of what we used to call "the mighty dollar" (which rings a little hollow now).

Friedman’s Op-Ed in yesterday's Times offers an interesting hypothesis on the origin (or at least one origin) of the suicide bombers, of which there seems to be an endless supply in Iraq. He sees the problem beginning with the terrors of the Saddam regime, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, and then the ten years of economic decline under Western sanctions in the 1990s. Iraq went from being the country with the most developed middle class in the region to a country of unemployed, without hope, a country from which the middle class and opportunity had essentially emigrated. The result was that when we attacked, we were faced with an already deeply humiliated and hopeless population, one who young people in their desperation had in many cases turned to extremist religious movements, either Shi'a or Sunni. He points out that unlike the situation in Palestine, these bombers commit suicide anonymously, indicating to him the extremity of their desperation. Our worst intelligence failure in his mind is the failure to understand this development in the minds of the people that we attacked. It suggests the complexity of understanding either friends or foes, a complexity that goes far beyond "understanding the culture" in the sense that this understanding is imparted in graduate schools.

Two members of the Defense Intelligence Agency have reported to their Agency, who forwarded the report to the Pentagon, that prisoner abuse has apparently continued long after Abu Ghraib was exposed. Last June they saw prisoners being brought into a detention center in Baghdad with burn marks on their backs and damage to their kidneys. They saw a prisoner being badly beaten up. When they complained to those in charge of the detention center, the DI officials were threatened by those in charge, their photographs confiscated, their car keys impounded, their email screened, and they were warned never to report the information. Reports have also surfaced that the FBI has severely criticized coercive techniques that continue to be used at Guantanamo Bay.

It appears to me that prisoner abuse, often including torture by any definition, has become so much a part of standard operating procedure in some American interrogation and detention facilities that it will take a major effort to change the picture. Abuse and cruelty has become an integral part of the working culture of those inflicting the punishment. If we do not go beyond the surface and attack this problem honestly soon, then America’s reputation will continue to take heavy blows, and unity within the country as well as our erstwhile alliances will be still further eroded.

Kristof in today's op-ed piece takes aim at the Administration's campaign claim that it has the support of many countries in Iraq. Thirty countries have soldiers in Iraq now, although this number will be down to 27 by next month. Eight of our partners have less than one hundred soldiers involved. To get a feeling for what was going on, Kristof talked to the Estonians in the government and outside. He found that they do not intend to increase their force above the 55 they have there now. The major reason is that the population is very opposed to the war. They allow the mission only because they feel it is an insurance policy in case Russia threatens them again. Kristof's belief is that except for Blair's British support this is pretty much the case in the rest of the Coalition. They are just making a show in support of a cause they do not believe in. In fact, many Estonians think the Americans are as bad as the Russians, but better for them because further away.

The latest news is that the effort of the Ayatollah Sistani to bring the different Shiite parties together for the election seems to be failing. A group of parties calling themselves the "Shiite Council have decided to break away from the United Iraqi Alliance that Sistani has sponsored. The disputes are over which parties get the higher positions on the election lists. Most of the people we have heard of before, including Chalabi and Muqtada al-Sadr are staying with the Alliance that is dominated by the Dawa and Sciri parties (the two older wings of the Shiite world in Iraq, the latter being a party considered dominated by Iranians. The Council's chief objection seems to be that there are too many foreigners or exiles in the Alliance list. Although many parties are in the Council, their makeup is unclear. They seem to be more nativist and antiforeign than the main stream, but this is just an impression. Postscript: The next day the report is that the parties have made up, and indeed the project of having one large list including nearly everyone is back on the burners. It is also reported that several Sunni parties are preparing their lists even after they had opposed going ahead with the January elections.

Tuesday, the Times reported another CIA report from Baghdad, supposedly secret. (The leak proofing of the Agency does not seem to have helped. It judged that the security situation was bad and likely to get worse. The main impediments were the lagging ability of the Iraqi security forces and the inability of the government to get economic development going. It has evoked a rejoinder from the Ambassador who says we are doing much better than this estimate. But in military and intelligence circles there is a lot of support for the individual who composed it upon leaving his position in Baghdad. The American government continues on the surface to be upbeat about everything.

The "Fride" research organization in Madrid has provided a useful rundown on the elections in Afghanistan, recent and future. In the presidential election, the fact of significant opposition was important, as was the estimated 70% participation. The campaigning was short and not very meaningful, with most attention being given to trying to obtain concessions from Karzai as a price for withdrawal. Still, some important regional personages opposed Karzai, and two or three overwhelming won in their local areas. The fact, however, that they were largely unknown outside their home territories gave a tremendous advantage to Karzai. The results showed good turnout countrywide, and for women it was higher than expected, except in a few extremely conservative southern areas. Karzai generally did especially well in urban areas. He also won Herat, a surprise (although throwing out Ismail Khan a few weeks ahead of the elections may have accounted for the difference between results here and in the areas won by the Uzbek and Hazara leaders). The Tajik leader Qanooni did not win any large areas, but won 95% in the Panjshir, the center of the resistance against both the Soviets and the Taliban.

Looking toward the elections later this year, the analysis points out that the irregularities in the election that were insignificant with Karzai's overwhelming victory, would not be insignificant in closer elections. 2005 elections will be for district councils, provincial councils, and the lower house of parliament. Since none of these institutions exist at present, carrying out such elections successfully presents quite a challenge. There is a real danger that the local militias of the warlords and captains of the drug trade will be able to capture too large a proportion of the positions for the health of the society. Karzai has shown himself adept at making deals with local powers. Let us hope he can change his approach to get beyond this point. Nevertheless, recent polls show a great deal of popular confidence in the system and the process. Let us hope that the international community can help them attain the brighter future that they expect.

Several more positive steps have recently been made in support of the elections. First, the Americans have decided to put 12,000 more troops in until after the election (at least). Second, Allawi is on another campaign to get support for the election. This time he is in Jordan. Jordan now says it backs the early elections. In Jordan he is meeting with many Sunni leaders, party and otherwise. These include some of the Sunni tribal leaders with whom he has had past relationships. They evidently find it more comfortable in Jordan these days.

There have been some interesting new ideas about how the elections might be carried out in stages, so-called "rolling elections". After the first elections in the safer areas, security forces would be brought in for short periods in one area after another until people had had a reasonable chance to vote everywhere. While people elected in the first round would meet before the completion of the process, it is thought that they might agree to dealing with non-binding measures that could easily be changed when they meet after the completion of the process.

Many academics continue to believe that we have lost already in Iraq, partly because of the record there and partly because of the general proposition that insurgencies like this do not fail. This is a respectable argument. However, my judgement is that this election will take place regardless. If it does get a reasonable turnout most places, or is repaired some way, then we will be faced with a new situation — a government now considered legitimate by more than 50% of Iraqis will be the enemy of the insurgents. Clearly, many cases in the past, such as Sri Lanka, suggest this is not the end of the story, but it should certainly change the parameters.

For anyone interested in the elections and the election controversy in Iraq, the accompanying discussion offers a wealth of useful argument and detail.

Let us review what is to happen. The election will "choose a 275-member assembly that will serve for about a year. During that time, it will select a president and two deputies, who will in turn choose one of the assembly´s members to serve as prime minister. Its main task, however, will be to draft a constitution by the middle of August 2005. This will be submitted to a referendum by next October, and then used to conduct, by 15 December 2005, elections for a fully constitutional government that is to take power by the end of next year."

The election has made some good progress. Of 545 projected registration centers, all but 90 are said to be functioning. In spite of the fact of some fairly stringent qualifications including petitions with 500 names, 126 party or individual applications to run have already been approved, although only 15 seem to represent sunni groups. The United States is trying to have one super list developed that would include most of the people in the present governing council. This would favor us and returnees. However, the Ayatollah Sistani is putting together a super Shi'a list that will probably be more attractive. In this list, 30-50% will be for shi'a religious parties, including 10-12% for al-Sadr's group, the same for SCIRI (pro-Iranian) and 20% for various Dawa groups. On the other side, an Iraqi Founding Congress has brought together all the groups intending to boycott the election.

The writers doubt that the elections can go forward with the amount of violence that there is in the country. Their hope is that the Ayatollah Sistani will see that the best solution is to wait. However, why he would do this given the advantages of not doing it are unclear. It would be a magnanimous gesture and mean a lot for the country. But this sort of approach to the problems of the country has been rare in the past and I doubt if we can have a great deal of confidence in it now, even from one with the good credentials of the Ayatollah.

In two interesting papers, Andreas Wimmer and colleagues argue that Afghanistan and Iraq are ineffective states, unable to control or service the people for whom they are responsible. He argues that in this condition of state collapse, the first task of the international community should be strengthening state institutions rather than the establishment of functioning democracies. It is an appealing argument, and one I have made in other forms many times in this blog. We need, for example, to be less concerned with establishing “civic society”, that basis for good democracy that has become so popular in the literature. What we need are administrations that can provide health, education, security, and legal services that are both effective and acceptable to the greater part of the population.

The problem then becomes: How does America get from the position it has painted itself into to the position that Wimmer would have us occupy? Fortunately, it would appear that his goal is, attainable in Afghanistan. Although we have talked a great deal about democracy there, we have committed relatively little money and relatively few troops to the enterprise. The same for the larger international community. This leaves us an opportunity to put further democratization on a back burner and concentrate on creating effective state services. Sometimes the two overlap; sometimes they do not. One of Wimmer’s suggestions would be to talk less about international human rights, particularly issues such as women’s rights, and concentrate on establishing an effective system that will make possible any rights at all. Similarly, if Karzai goes ahead with the planned parliamentary elections, we should not be too exercised about the fine points. If a legislature is established that is widely accepted, then the government can function, and functioning is the first step.

The situation in Iraq is more difficult. We have made so much of the democracy side that we will be disappointing large segments of the population if we do not carry on in this vein. This will be true of both the secular and religious groups, for they are both figuring out how to manage the system we have promised for their own ends. But there must be priorities. Violence has been the story of Iraq’s political life for too long. We should support almost anything that brings down the level. It is what we want and what the man in the street wants, if not necessarily his political leaders. Likewise, we have identified, falsely I would suggest, but nevertheless have, capitalism with democracy. Iraq today is almost entirely a state-run economy. People “out of work” means primarily that the state no longer has the positions that Saddam had open for the average person. The job the United States and the Iraqi government must resolutely tackle is to get the economy functioning, at any ideological cost. If this means reestablishing some of the state institutions that characterized the former state, we should at least temporarily do that. It is no time to throw “cold water” on the people in a misguided attempt to move them immediately into a capitalist economy. Get the society working, then reform it, should be our approach, regardless of how far this may diverge from the standards of the modern liberal society that we hold out as the future for all peoples.

“The Future of Iraq: Dictatorship, Democracy, or Division” by Liam Anderson and Gareth Stansfield argues that Iraq is an artificial state that can probably be held together only by the use of Saddam-like violence. In particular, they argue that it is in our interest to allow the Kurds to form a state of their own in the north. Their case is many pronged. First, they see it as a moral duty of the international community. They were promised such a state after World War II only to have it taken away from them because of Turkish objections. The rest of the world has subsequently used Kurdish insurrections for their own purposes on several occasions, only to abandon the Kurds to their fate when it was no longer in the interest of the larger power (often the United States). Second, and related to this, Iraq is an artificial state. The northern or Mosul Province (an Ottoman Province that included the Kurdish area, but also a good deal more) was added as an after thought to the Ottoman Provinces of central and southern Iraq. The Kurds have since then never stopped revolting. Third, the only example today of a peaceful and more or less democratic area in Iraq is Kurdistan. For over five years the Kurds have managed to live a reasonably modern and prosperous life in their enclave. Politically this amounts to no more than two one-party states that hardly meet our definition of democracy. Still, in the context of Iraq, this is an important accomplishment. It should not be lightly abandoned in a search for a more perfect Iraq. Finally, if we try to force all parts of Iraq to live together, we will end up with something like Bosnia where only the presence of foreign troops prevents the parts from once again being at one another’s throats.

The argument of Stansfield and Gareth is appealing. The Kurds do have a right. And we have no “duty” to reestablish Iraq within its prewar borders. However, were we to follow this route, there would be many short-term losses. We would not gain friends among the Sunni or Shi’a who might argue that we were destroying Iraq, and that we had this in mind all the time. We also would find few friends among the Turks who would view the new state as a threat. The Iranians also would find an independent Kurdistan threatening, and would in any event side with the Shiites. Much of the world would argue that we have betrayed our responsibility in Iraq. (This would be particularly true if we took the Anderson and Stansfield suggestion that we establish a permanent military base in Kurdistan to oversee the area.) However, in the longer term supporting an independent Kurdistan may prove to have been a good fallback position. We would feel better about ourselves. We would have made a firm friend in the area (which we need badly). And if the rest of Iraq goes to hell, we would have at least one positive accomplishment to look back on.

A middle ground might be found if we could persuade (and continue to persuade) the Kurds to accept a semiautonomous state within Iraq and the Sunnis and Shi’as to accept such a solution. Given past history, it would be hard for either side to believe the promises of the other. However, if this the agreement fell apart later, this might mean Kurdistan becomes independent in 2010 rather than 2005 — not a bad outcome. For in this scenario many of the criticisms of the United States would be greatly muted, and yet we would have achieved a free Kurdistan. If the autonomy arrangement hold, even better. Of course, getting to the final solution is likely to entail some fighting. But with very little help the Kurds should be able to hold up their end. And eliminating violence from the scene in Iraq in either 2005 or 2010 is, in any event, most improbable.

A large group of political parties in Iraq, including most of the Sunni parties and the two major Kurdish parties, met a couple of days ago. The result was a proclamation asking for the elections to be postponed six months so that the whole population would be able to vote with security. One of these parties was that of the Prime Minister Allawi, although he has himself not taken a position on the issue. The response of the American Ambassador and President Bush was to insist that the election had to take place on January 30. The Elections Commission also agreed, saying that they had no authority to postpone the elections beyond January. Yesterday, the representative of the Ayatollah Sistani weighed in with a statement that the elections could not be delayed. At about the same time forty political groups, mostly Shiite, issued a “fiery statement” that the elections must not be delayed. What is happening is this. The Kurds have apparently come to realize that if they are to have any chance of stopping a Shiite juggernaut able to write a constitution forever taking away their hard-won autonomy, they need to work with the Sunni Arabs — a group they hate on other grounds, including the identification of many Sunni Arabs with Saddam’s persecutions. If the elections are held early, then the Sunnis will not have time enough to organize effectively in their highly volatile provinces and sections of Baghdad, and they will not have time to get the recalcitrant Sunni groups such as the Muslim Scholars to give up their opposition to the elections. The result will be that the Shiites will turn out a relatively larger vote than they would have if the country were all peaceful and the Sunnis will turn out a relatively small vote. The Kurds apparently have the additional problem in that their efforts to repopulate Kirkuk and the surrounding area with Kurds will not be far enough advanced on January 30. On the other hand, the Shi’a know that the security situation will make their majority even clearer than it would be otherwise. They would welcome the opportunity to impose whatever constitution they would like. In the short term, this presents a challenge to the Americans. The need the continued support of the Shi’a or the enterprise is lost. They hope that the Kurds will stay on board in the last analysis because of their old support for the process. The Americans can hardly hope, however, that keeping to the January time table, which much of the Arab and Western world already opposes, is going to increase the legitimacy of the exercise. For a country that loves to criticize others for not having “free and fair” elections, carrying out present plans under what many consider impossible conditions, is not an easy choice. The United States is also concerned that giving the Shi’a a free hand in drawing up the constitution might result in a theocracy much like Iran. I believe that this possibility is much overdrawn, but it certainly enters the minds of some American leaders. In the longer term, if Iraq’s leaders remain split over the timing of the election, then this may be the first step toward a breaking up of the country into three or more pieces. While the Shi’a have the votes, the other two groups have shown themselves more effective in the violence department. It is not at all clear that the Shi’a could force the other groups into a united Iraq with them in undisputed control. It could be done with American help. But I do not think that we want to take on the task of forcefully uniting Iraq after elections. It will soon be time for us to go.

Today’s paper suggests that the situation in Iraq may be better than many have thought. First, as we have already commented, the international community meeting in Egypt has been willing to accept the idea of an election as the solution. Perhaps more significantly, the meetings did not turn into a propaganda bashing over events in Falluja. It appears that many people, in and outside Iraq, have become increasingly tired of the indiscriminate killing by the insurgents. Second, a insurgent web site broadcast a tape of Zarqawi condemning Sunni Arab clerics for having “let them down” in their greatest hour of need. It goes on to say that clerics have apparently “stopped supporting the Mujahedeen”. If this tape is authentic, it has several implications. First, Falluja was an American victory. It has been noticed that after a flurry of attacks, insurgent incidents have declined a bit. The continuing struggle in Mosul and elsewhere might be a desperate last gasp (hope, hope). The new offensive by government and Coalition forces south of Baghdad seems to be going well. It is also significant that a main goal of this offensive is the suppression of criminal gangs rather than the usual targets. Also, if the Sunni clerics have by and large backed off a bit, it may indicate that there is a growing rift between the extremist doctrines of Zarqawi and other ‘Salafists” and the more mainstream Sunnis. This has always been a potential line of cleavage but so far we had not seen much of it. This would rather isolate most of the “foreigners”. Finally, there appears to be increasing political activity leading up to the elections. More than 200 Iraqi political parties have registered for the elections. The Shi’a are working hard on trying to get a single list put together so that they can end up dominating the scene.

The primary conclusion of Noah Feldman’s “What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building” is that by invading Iraq with an announced intention to build a renewed nation we have taken on a responsibility of trusteeship that cannot be lightly laid down. While he agrees that we must press on toward elections, he insist that even the completion of elections will not end the matter. Until the Iraqis are able to establish security, that is, actually rule their country in a satisfactory manner, we will be ethically bound to provide security for the new institutions. When they can run the place themselves, and this may be several years from now, then we can say that the nation-building phase is over and leave. By being able to rule, Feldman specifically does not mean that the new government needs to be able to defend the country from others. As he points out, South Korea is sovereign, but we still aid in its defense.

For several reasons, I do not agree. Our implicit promise to the Iraqis was to give them the opportunity to form a new and better political society than Saddam offered them. As long as he lived, they were evidently unable to get out from under his tyranny. We came, we shoved him aside, we invested many lives in trying to give them this opportunity. Many Iraqis have responded in ways that have impeded our objectives. First, a portion of the population mounted an insurgent campaign that continues. Second, the rest of the society has been unable to come forward in sufficient numbers and with sufficient determination to take over the security responsibility in spite of a great deal of effort by the Coalition forces. It would seem to me that if we support the process until an election whose results are welcomed and accepted by a significant part of the population, we should then work out with the new government the terms of our departure. The resources and attention of the United States are not infinite. There are many other crises and potential crises in the world that demand our resources and leadership. This is a larger ethical issue. As long as we are stuck with an effort of the size we have in Iraq we can simply look on as events elsewhere deteriorate. We cannot be effective. And the rest of the world knows it.

Let us compare our effort in Iraq with that in Afghanistan. In the latter we brought in a much smaller force, even if we include those from NATO and elsewhere. The populations and size of country are roughly similar. We continue to have violent incidents in Afghanistan. Yet since we have had an election, the future of the country seems firmly in the hands of the new government in spite of its relatively incompetent security forces. We will keep troops there indefinitely. But these are small units and the purpose is not primarily to shore up the government. I suggest that we will leave the Afghans to work out their own future, even if it is not a perfect democracy. Much of the country is in the hands of warlords. That may remain the case. So be it.

Turning back to Iraq, we see that there are many segments of the population. Thinking of experience in the Balkans and elsewhere Feldman evidently sees our responsibility the creation of a unitary state. If we stay, this is what we will insist on, may even be forced to fight for. But it seems to me that this is an aspect of the Iraqi future that we should not weigh in on. If the state breaks up, we do not want to be a party to it. On the other hand, it could be best for the Iraqis. At least the Kurds have fought too long for autonomy to have it denied to them now. We should leave a leveler playing field on which some of these decisions can be worked out. Then leave it to the Iraqis.

As mentioned in my last post, the international community apparently agrees with the Ayatollah Sistani that elections are the key to legitimizing and ultimately resolving the problem of Iraq. However, unlike the Americans (officially) and the interim government so far, many foreign representatives believe the date of January 30 that has been set may be unreasonably soon. It is clear that the insurgency continues apace in the Sunni Arab areas. Although there has been some decline in the frequency of incidents recently, it is still higher than before Falluja II. 90 of the country’s 540 registration centers have been closed in recent weeks because of the threat of violence. Registration has been proceeding well outside these areas. In Baghdad, there is a surprising expectation that eighty percent or more of the population will vote on January 30. In the worst areas, where registration may remain impossible, one idea is to allow registration on the day of voting to prevent effective insurgent interference.

All parties have been much exercised by the problem of how the voters might be protected. The United States now plans on increasing the size of its force in Iraq by 4000 or so to help guard the process. This is still woefully inadequate. The plan, in any event, is to keep American forces away from polling places to reduce the appearance of a coerced vote. Yet the Iraqis have less than half the number of security personnel that had been thought necessary for the protection of the booths. In addition, faith has been lost in police forces as evidence mounts that many units have been penetrated. The police chief of Mosul has been arrested after apparently accepting a $600,000 bribe from the insurgents. In Mosul, Kurdish militias were brought in to fill the gap. Some Iraqi leaders are suggesting that some of the Shiite militias be asked to help guard the polling process. But given ethnic fears and party distrusts, such solutions might cause as many problems as they solve.

Some of the best news about Iraq in quite a while comes from reports of the increasing willingness of the world as a whole to accept some of the American “burden”. First, the Americans have managed to convince major world powers as well as neighboring Arab states to agree to a reduction in the Iraq debt by as much as 80%. this includes Russia, France, and Germany. Next, a major conference at the foreign minister level is being held at an Egyptian resort to discuss alternatives for Iraq. This includes many of the Arab states, Iran, the principal Europeans, Powell from the United States, and Annan from the United Nations. The interim Iraqi government is also involved. Whatever the outcome, and the objectives appear to be modest, the exercise gives a much needed expression of support for the legitimacy of both the actions of the United States, the interim Iraqi regime, and the upcoming elections. So far the only difference that has developed is one on whether the elections should be followed by a withdrawal of American forces that is announced before the elections. The Iraqi government, the Egyptians and the U.S. argued that we must wait until after security is established, but most of the other participants were for the idea.

Noah Feldman has recently published a courageous book entitled What We Owe Iraq : War and the Ethics of Nation Building. As one of the advisors in Iraq after the beginning of the occupation and as an authority on Iraq and Islam, Feldman brings to the task an impressive resumé. His argument is that whatever the mistakes and misjudgments that we made in going into Iraq when and how we did, we now have a moral obligation to stay and complete the task of building democracy in Iraq, but only by adhering to some rather different rules than previous colonizers. Whatever we do we must create stability and security. After that we can assist the many factions in the country to work out their differences and fears through democratic processes.

I am sympathetic to the argument. But Feldman is unfortunately stuck with “democracy” as the only acceptable outcome for Iraq because our generation has not learned any other way of thinking about political alternatives for countries harder to govern than our own. In his own presentation he points to Somalia and Haiti as cases of American and international failure to live up to their trusteeship responsibilities. I would assume that he would think that less than democratic regimes in these countries might be preferable to what they have now. But he has no tools to thinks about such regimes, and so fails to make them part of the discussion.

What people everywhere, and especially in the less developed world, crave more than the institutions of democracy as we understand them are security, stability, legitimate government, and freedom (understood as independence or autonomy). The people of the two Kurdish enclaves in Iraq, for example, have governments that we often hold up as examples and that probably satisfy their people to a reasonable extent. Yet neither is really a democracy. Neither is likely to vote out of local power their entrenched party and personal leaders. The parties will see to this. Further afield, the people of China are coming to challenge the rest of the world on all fronts, economically and even in terms of “soft power”. Yet China does not have a democracy. Its people accept the regime because it is Chinese (therefore “free”) and legitimate in their eyes (a vague and yet apparently meaningful concept). China appears fully accepted by Washington. The communist government of Mongolia before the collapse of the USSR ruled as an authoritarian communist party. Yet it modernized its people and offered services unheard of in the developing world. Everyone I talked to in the early nineties in Ulan Bator was amazed how modernized the Mongolians were. Sexual equality was well advanced. This contrasted remarkably with the way of life and services offered by “democracies” that I was visiting at the same time, such as the Dominican Republic, India, or Guyana.

All of which suggests that regardless of our pretensions, we would be doing an important service to the Iraqi people if we left behind a free, stable, secure, and legitimate Iraqi government regardless of the extent to which it reflected the standards of a modern liberal democracy. Perhaps the best way to get independence, legitimacy, stability, and security is through the establishment of effective democratic institutions. But we should remember that these institutions are merely means to the broader goal of leaving behind a responsible Iraqi state that serves its people.

The Presidential election went fairly well and we are looking forward to parliamentary elections that will make possible the creation of a fully functioning democracy in Afghanistan. However, all is not going well. The United Nations reports that Afghanistan is now producing more opium and heroin than it ever has in its history. Kabul’s interior minister claims that 87% of the world’s opium is produced in Afghanistan. This is no doubt a considerable exaggeration but gives some idea of the size of the problem. It is also significant that more and more of the processing of the raw opium into products meant for Western markets is now in Afghanistan. We can take comfort in the fact that reconstruction and improved security has now made possible the resurrection of a viable industry that had languished under the Taliban. However, experience in Colombia and elsewhere suggests that drugs and democracy make poor companions. For drugs are in the hands of a few people, often warlords, self-appointed or appointed by Kabul, who because of their control over relatively immense resources are able to control the countryside on a detailed basis through either intimidation, bribery, or other means of affecting the political process, democratic or not. There should be no doubt that the majority of the legislators elected in the near future will be beholden to a greater or lesser extent to the drug lords. This will be democracy, but perhaps not what we had in mind.

The government talks a good, anti-drug line, but it is during its watch (and that of the foreign soldiers as well) that the problem has mushroomed. There is some crop destruction, but in the long run it is unlikely to succeed. For farmers there is simply no crop that will come close to matching what opium offers in returns. The only effective control seems to be overproduction, and the effectiveness of this control will necessarily wax and wane. In addition to the other built-in advantages of growing opium, the lack of adequate transportation between farm and market also increases the attractiveness of a light, easily transported product for most Afghans. No one has good ideas on how to control this problem. certainly democracy and national self-determination are not going to help. Obviously creating democracies in the world cannot be our only concern.

Today’s paper brings us the news that in Basra several hundred Shiites have founded an organization called the “Anger Brigades”. They are angry at the killing in cold blood of Shi’as, particularly in some incidents south of Baghdad. They demand that local Sunni and Saudi clerics issue fatwas condemning the killing of Shi’as by Sunnis. If not, they will be on the war path. Their ostensibly intention is to fight with Sunnis who have come in from other countries, but this could be just the beginning of a much larger fight. The war of Sunnis and Shi’as was advocated as readers may recall in a note from Zarqawi many months ago. Why he thought a war of Shi’as and Sunnis would benefit the Jihadist cause is not clear. But what is clear is that the Islamist extremists are mostly extremist Sunnis for whom Shi’as are just as much heretics as Christians. Attacks on Shi’as by their comrades in Pakistan have already indicated as much. News of this new form of Shi’a militancy comes at the same time as we learn of the arrest of Sunni clerics in Baghdad and surrounding areas for advocating violence against Americans. It should also be noted that strong reactions against what has happened in Falluja seems this time to be largely confined to the Sunni area. This was not the case when Falluja was attacked the first time. It also comes a time when the only Iraqi anti-insurgent forces the have proved effective are Kurds, a people who have been fighting other Iraqis, particularly Sunni Arabs, for many years.

I hate to be an advocate of sectarian warfare. But the ability of the Shi’a and Kurds to stand up to the Sunni Arab nationalists and Islamists may be exactly what we need to save our preemptive experiment in Iraq. This being the case, it is hardly the time for the United States to engage in a war of words with the Iranian government over the question of nuclear weapons. It is true that the main Iraqi Shi’a leaders reject the leadership of the Iranian theocrats. Nevertheless, this is treacherous ground and we should for the time being, at least, tread carefully.

Yesterday’s paper brought a lengthy Op-Ed by two Dartmouth political scientists on the insurgency in Iraq. It reluctantly came to the conclusion that we were almost sure to fail unless we divided up the country or turned it over to another strongman, neither of which alternatives they approved. They argued their case with reference to seven major insurgency wars: France in Indochina, the United States in Indochina, the British in Malaya, the French in Algeria, Israel in the Occupied Territories, and Russia in Afghanistan and in Chechnya. Only the British won. But their opponents in Malaya were a minority within a minority — and yet it took twelve years.

However, on examination one can find ways in which all the other insurgencies were also quite different than what we face in Iraq. For one thing, as readers of this blog have heard too often, the guerrilla war in Vietnam against the Americans was won not by guerrillas but by divisions of North Vietnamese troops led into Saigon by tanks. In this case and Afghanistan, the guerrillas were heavily supported with money and arms by an outside power (USSR in Vietnam and US in Afghanistan). The insurgency in Iraq receives some outside support, but not anything like the support of a major power such as the United States in Afghanistan. Next, and most important, the goals of the guerrillas in these examples were well spelled out and known by all participants. Generally, they wanted a country of their own. Now to the extent that our opponents in Iraq fight on the basis of “kick out the foreigner”, this would seem to be a similar situation. However, for most Iraqis (the Shi’a and Kurds) the situation is by no means so simple. They see an opportunity to have a country of their own only if the foreigner succeeds in putting down the Sunni Arab minority. Movements such as that of Muqtada al-Sadr seriously confuse this issue, but the anti-Sunni Arab cause still seriously conflicts with the insurgency’s nationalist cause outside of the Sunni Arab heartland.

With all the caveats, it is still the case that putting down an insurgency such as that in the Sunni Triangle remains a very difficult task. It would be less difficult if we really intended to stay indefinitely. Regardless of some extremists in the White House, the American and British people (and even less other Coalition partners) do not intend to stay. We do not have twelve years. Without linguistic skills, often remaining in the country only a few months, the Americans soldiers are hardly the skilled colonialists that the British and French were. Insurgencies of this kind are more easily contained through police work than through the use of Marines, tanks, and artillery. We also have trouble depending on our local “native forces”. As the authors of the Op-Ed point out, the use of local security forces has often failed in these situations. They are generally poorly trained and poorly motivated. This sounds like most of the units on our side in Iraq. Unfortunately, with unemployment at record levels, most members of these forces simply sign up for a job. And when we do have some motivated local forces, such as the Kurds, they may be considered almost as much outsiders by the locals they confront as we are.

The one bright spot continues to be the inability of the insurgency to actually come up with a reason for fighting. Recent evidence suggests that the number that are outsiders fired by Islamic Jihadism is actually quite small. Most are nationalists, and most of the money is coming from money hidden in Syria by the Baathists as things fell apart. Many of the insurgent soldiers are also mercenaries, paid in some cases by the number of Americans killed. The old Baathist vision for Iraq is unlikely to enlist many outside its closed ranks. Their rallying cry is essentially negative and anti-foreign. This can be potent enough in some cases, but for most Iraqis it is likely not. The interim government and the Americans have at least an image of the future society they want. The Baathist nationalists do not. We can hope this will eventually be their undoing.

The present situation in Iraq appears once again to be reaching disaster proportions. Part of the trouble has been the insistence that without control of every part of the country, we cannot hold the promised January elections. Once again I would like to suggest that this must be finessed. We have the vast majority of Kurds and Shi’as either on our side or neutral. It would be nice if they lived in definite geographical areas, but they do not. Particularly in cities such as Baghdad and Mosul there is a mixed population, although there are different areas of these cities dominated by particular groups. Nevertheless, with careful consideration of the views of democratic party leaders and Ayatollah Sistani we can bring about enough peace in three-fourth of the country to hold reasonably good elections. They have long insisted that this is what they want.

At this time, we must hold urgent meetings with the leaders of Iraqi factions and parties laying out the conditions of our withdrawal from the country. Going over the map area by area (and sometimes out lines will not follow the provincial boundaries) we should demonstrate how and when American and other coalition forces will withdraw as they are replaced by Iraqi national army, guard, police, or militia units. We must make it clear that immediately after the election succeeds in areas where it is feasible a timetable for this area will be laid out. This timetable will have an estimated date of departure for major American and coalition units from this “Democratic Iraq” in July 2005. This discussion should strengthen support for elections since it will tie our departure from specified areas of Iraq to election success. Democratic Iraq will at this point might be expected to include more than half the country’s area and perhaps 60% of its people.

We should then discuss what will happen in the remainder of the country, labeled “Occupied Iraq”. This is the area where effective elections will not have been held by February 1 and where Iraqi national security forces still cannot without outside assistance guarantee reasonable security. In Occupied Iraq we will promise to hold the line against the insurgency with American and coalition troops until such time as Iraqi national forces can take over. We will attempt to do this without major offensive actions. After national forces have had three months of experience through assuming security functions in Democratic Iraq, their more experienced units should be introduced into Occupied Iraq. Experiments with their introduction should begin in mixed contexts such as Mosul and Baghdad. Only after they have shown their effectiveness in such situations will these forces be used to replace American forces in the most hotly contested Sunni Arab areas. Gradually the American presence would then be reduced in Occupied Iraq. The transition process should not be hurried. But there should be a commitment to have all major American units out of Iraq three months after Iraqi national forces have assumed responsibility in essentially all Sunni Arab areas.

From about May to August, Democratic Iraq will be in the process of extending its control over the entire country. In those areas in which it was not possible previously to hold successfully elections, they should be held or reheld and the resulting winners integrated into the national parliament.

If it is impossible to work out such an agreement and the accompanying timetable with a sufficient number of the most representative non-insurgent leaders, then the United States should calmly point out that the American public and that of the other coalition partners are not committed to an unending military presence in the country. If the Iraqi leadership does not go along with our suggestions, or propose alternatives that meet our objectives in other ways, our intention will be to remove our forces by July 1 through a phased withdrawal regardless of the security situation. If they still wish to hold the elections in January, we will help where we can. But we cannot guarantee security everywhere, and we cannot be responsible for the possibly unrepresentative nature of the result nor the ethnic fighting that may break out as we leave. Nor will we be able to prevent the possibility of a further deterioration of the security situation for Iraqis in much of the country.

The War in the Sunni Triangle and environs seems to be going worse than ever. As American forces finish up Falluja, the insurgent counterattack in many other cities and towns throughout the Arab Sunni area and beyond its fringes appears to be getting ever more destructive. These are concentrating their fury on the new Iraqi police and the oil export pipelines. They are also anxious to do damage to the Americans wherever they can be found. The Falluja victory is fraught with more and more questions. To me, the most alarming is the change of military reporting to emphasize “body count”, with all the implications of the usage that came back to haunt us in Vietnam. “Body count” is a handy way to measure “success” when fighting a war on multiple fronts, or without a front at all. Here, the usual measure of success, the taking of territory no longer makes sense. Two problems with “body count” are that it more starkly reveals what is happening in a war than more sanitized measures and its wild unreliability. It relies on the men and officers directly involved in military actions reporting back truthfully. But these persons know that their reputations in this war and throughout their careers will depend on whether they were successful in battle. Consequently, overestimation cannot be avoided. In this case, as Falluja winds down, 1600 insurgents are reported to have been killed in the city. Reporters with the troops say, however, that they have seen very few bodies. Usually this has been ascribed in Iraq to the Arab habit of immediately burying persons where possible. But it is hard to imagine that the hard-pressed guerrillas in Falluja have had time to bury more than a 1000 bodies.

In the widespread counterattacks outside Falluja, it is reported by our officers that the insurgents seem to be better organized and trained than they have been. This is true both of conventional attacks and of suicide bombings that now involve more than one attacking vehicle at a time. Better planning and coordination also seems to be true of the overall pattern of attacks. The guerrillas are less intent now on vanishing after each attack. They are more out in the open more of the time than they have been. Their morale is obviously high, even foolishly high. Yet the most recent consensus seems to be that this is largely a Baathist or nationalist campaign rather than a campaign by religious extremists. In Falluja, 1000 were captured, of which only a handful were non-Iraqis. Apparently, the movement feels they can take the losses. If we assume there were 5,000,000 Sunni Arabs before the war, this makes 2,500,000 males, of which perhaps 1,500,000 were potential fighters. Let us assume that 750,000 of these are bitterly opposed to the Americans; this is not an unreasonable number given the interviews that reporters have had with Sunni Arabs. If we have killed 75,000 in this war, it means we have killed only 10% of the potential Sunni Arab guerrilla pool. Armies have in the past often suffered fatalities at this rate and continued to come out and fight.

There seem to be a steady stream of those groups exiting from the struggle. Doctors with Borders has left. The Hungarian parliament has decided that their troops should come home now rather than stay until after the elections as their government has wanted. The argument of the center-right group that led the charge on this is that the troops were there to help bring democracy. They have concluded that this is not going to happen, so they should come home now. It makes sense to them, but it doesn’t help our government and its allies. Many Americans are going to start thinking the same thing.

American officers also carry a heavy burden. For they know that they must persevere in a task that they have found increasingly discouraging. In this latest go-around, they have successfully organized a large-scale offensive into Falluja, chosen as a target because it had become symbolic of the ability of the resistance to succeed against the Americans and had become a center for the Islamist resistance, the most virulent form of the insurgency. It was also decided at the highest levels that the government must have control over all parts of Iraq for the elections in January to be “legitimate”. Yet the battle has worked out according to the plan of the insurgents and not their own. And they knew that this is what would happen. They knew that the Americans would have to use heavy firepower from air and ground to win a quick and decisive “victory”. They knew that this would require the destruction of much of the city and the incidental killing of many of the civilians that had not been able or willing to leave. They knew that this would have political costs. They knew that most of the insurgents and particularly their leaders would be gone before their troops could capture the place. And they knew that these cadres would instigate battles elsewhere in the country. They knew that the only way the “capture” of the city could have any meaning in the long run would be if the accompanying Iraqi governmental forces and police could quickly take over from the Americans and establish a new order in the city. They also knew that these forces might not be up to the challenge. They also knew that the most reliable governmental forces for the job would be Kurdish or Shiite units, but that these might end up being treated by the Fallujans as much as outsiders as the Americans.

What has happened since in the rest of the Sunni Triangle and nearby fits the predictions made before the battle. There have been major insurgent attacks. The most organized attack was in Mosul where an insurgent force said to be 500 strong attacked a number of points simultaneously. Many places the police failed, fleeing or deserting. The subsequent firing of the police chief, the bringing in of Kurdish units, and the return of American forces from the Fallujan area seems to have calmed the situation, but again at what cost? In Ramadi, near Falluja, the streets appear to be again out of control. And as they ponder the daily “police blotter” of enemy actions, the officers read in their brand new counterinsurgency manual that the longer Americans take the lead in counterinsurgency operations, the greater the resentment of the population, and the more the legitimacy of the host nation government is called into question. But the officers also know that decisions are being forced by events. They may have to put their reading on hold until this is over — or until a reassignment back to the States.

It is not often that I wave the flag for soldiers in Iraq. Many flag wavers seem to have other agendas than simply “supporting our troops”. But as one reads the stream of information that the media pour out every day and takes time to focus on the families who have lost members or have them gravely injured, the predicament of average GIs in Iraq becomes ever more obvious. They have been sent into battle for what appear to be high-minded objectives, the freeing of a people from tyranny and the establishment of democracy. But except for those fortunate enough to find themselves in the more peaceful areas of Iraq, our GIs face a reality that is both more challenging and more discouraging. They find that they can win every battle and yet be surrounded by enemies who wish them dead. They find that their country did not prepare them for the counterguerrilla operations in which they are now involved. They were not given the armament they should have had, and they were not supported by a large enough force to do the job. The army has just now brought out a new manual for fighting guerrilla war to replace one that was forty years old. The Marines have gone into battle with a “small wars” manual published in 1940 that tells them how to manage mules and teaches them that mixed-race societies are "always difficult to govern, if not ungovernable, owing to the absence of a fixed character.'' (This must seem strange to the present generation of American GIs in which many are of “mixed race” even though they have not thought much about such a designation.) They know little of the language or customs of the people they are meant to save. Although they know that the security forces of the new Iraqi government are supposed to be on their side, they are unable to communicate with them, see them in uniforms of all kinds, and often find they are either hostile or unreliable or both. They do not know whom to trust, even people in American uniforms may not be Americans. They do not know where the “front” is, because as soon as they move through an area, insurgents may appear behind them in the areas they have just “cleared”. Alternately brave and fearful, excited and dead tired, idealistic and cynical, many live in a dream-like world in which goals become reduced to making it through until the day they can go home.

While the bad news seems piling up again day after day in Iraq, there are still a few bright clouds. It has been noticed by the media that the condemnation in the Arab world of the attack on Falluja has been greatly moderated this time over what it was during Falluja I last April. It appears that many Arabs are tiring of the killing by their side as well as ours. This same turning against the insurgents is also apparent in a few stray comments picked up by the press within the country. It is also important to keep in mind the extent to which parallel American policies have succeeded, at least so far, in Afghanistan, a country that many would have regarded as more difficult — and one in which we have had relatively few troops. This latter point needs to be remembered by those (such as myself) who have always insisted that we went into Iraq with too few troops. One cannot assume that all is well in Afghanistan. But it does appear that the Taliban (or al-Qaida, together or separately) are contained. They can still kill on occasion. But they do not seem to be likely to derail the upcoming parliamentary elections. And beyond that point the country may be able to relax. The plans to develop and reconstruct Afghanistan were much less extensive than those for Iraq. The difference is that the reconstruction has been able to keep ahead of the destruction in Afghanistan. The foreign and Afghan national forces are not large enough to be providing the security that exists today. So it must be that the tribes and their hated war lords are actually keeping the peace, at least in their fashion. This may be a lesson we will have to relearn in parts of Iraq.

As the fighting in Falluja moves toward its inevitable end, we have learned at least some things. First, with present tactics, we cannot “take” a city without largely destroying it. Second, there appear to be thousands of insurgents who are willing to sacrifice their lives in what are essentially hopeless encounters. Well-armed, some of these have been able to exact a considerable price before they are cut down. Second, the forces defending urban targets are quite capable of moving from city to city, and perhaps back again as we leave. The insufficiency of American forces to take on the endless series of threats that this promises is suggested by the outbreak of heavy insurgent attacks in Mosul as we were trying to end up our campaign in Falluja. Due to these attacks, Mosul, a considerably larger city, has been starting to fall under the control of the insurgents in the last few days. To save the situation, the Stryker Brigade that had been fully involved in Falluja was hurriedly taken out of that battle and sent back to Mosul. The national police and other government forces have been badly hurt once again by the hit and run tactics of the insurgents. But many of the insurgent attacks were also beaten back. Kurdish forces appear to have done better than most. They are after all units that have fought together for years, not groups of people hired off the streets in the last few months to defend the country. Mosul is a mixed city and the Sunni Arab dominated insurgency will not have free sailing.

Even after clearing operations in Ramadi last month, guerrillas seem to be appearing openly on the streets once again, with the Marines pretty much tied down in their stations. There were also more attacks in Baghdad yesterday. In Kirkuk they tried to kill the provincial governor. In Baquba thirty men attacked a government post but were driven off. Mortar attacks were made in Hawija and a car bomb went off in Hilla. And so it goes. The pace has picked up a little in answer to the attack on Falluja, but actions are pretty much in the same pattern that we have seen for months. In the Triangle and neighboring areas there is just not that much progress toward getting control over this movement. Their foot soldiers are getting so emboldened and morale seems so high that it may not matter as much as we thought if the people turn against them. After all, gangs in Sicily, Naples, and elsewhere have managed to exert continuing control over their communities even when they came to be hated by average civilians — and when life expectancy for the average member was not that promising.

The second taking of Falluja is well advanced. So far there are few surprises. Evidently about half the insurgents and most of their leaders left before the attack. It appears as though the city was not effectively cordoned off by coalition forces weeks ago when the military started talking of an imminent attack. Insurgent resistance is sporadic. The military acts surprised to find that the insurgents do not stand and fight, but simply melt away to reappear somewhere else. These are classic guerrilla tactics and one can’t imagine why they would do anything else given the disparity in equipment. The city is being heavily damaged from the air, and the fire of artillery and tanks. The military reports heavy casualties for the insurgents but very few civilian fatalities. One can be excused for not believing this. I am sure they are trying, but when there a building blocks progress it is destroyed with little actual knowledge of what is inside. The recent Johns Hopkins study suggests that there will be significant civilian casualties in a battle of this kind in a city, no matter how hard we try to avoid them.

The expected fallout on the political side is occurring. Several members of the government from the Sunni Arab community are quitting (but not all). Some of the Sunni Arab parties are saying they will not now compete in the elections (but not all are saying so). The major Sunni Arab religious association has condemned the attack and told all Arabs to abstain in the election. Even Muqtada al-Sadr has condemned the attacks on Falluja once again. All this is predictable. Of course, it brings into question the rationale for the attack, which was to make the elections possible in Falluja and everywhere else. There was certainly a problem with holding an election in a city under the complete control of the insurgents. But it has always been clear that political gains of “going in” to solve this problem might not equal the political costs. In Europe and the Arab world the attacks are being treated as just more American atrocities, a highly biased and thoughtless response. Yet the reality is not necessarily all that is important. What we are doing is bound to raise these issues. And once out there, the propaganda is what is remembered.

The other justification is that our plan of attack beginning with Falluja, and then carrying on to Ramadi and elsewhere in Anbar Province will break the back of the insurgency. Both the election and counterinsurgency arguments rest on assumptions that may prove wrong. We can kill insurgents month after month and still find there are more insurgents than when we began. We can take city after city. But if we do not hold what we conquer, or if the poorly trained and motivated Iraqi government forces do not hold onto our gains, then we will simply have to do it all over again — even for the purpose of the January elections.

As I have often suggested in these postings, with the number of troops we have on the ground, perhaps the best we can do is isolate the insurgents in those areas where they have the greatest popular support. This will leave our forces and “our Iraqis” available for securing the great majority of the country that is relatively peaceful. To make this work we will have to develop more effective control of the insurgents outside their home areas than we have now. It would seem to me that with our excellent night surveillance capability this should not be impossible. The second step here is to go ahead and hold the elections as best we can. We can provide voters in much of the Sunni Triangle with voting opportunities, particularly in Baghdad. The Iraqis intend to have overseas voting; perhaps they could also arrange for some people to vote outside their actual home territories. Where there is insufficient voting, the parliamentary seats in question should be held in reserve as open seats until such time as a more adequate process is available. It seems foolish to hold most of Iraq hostage to the bitterness of an insurgency that represents less than twenty percent of the population. But unfortunately, all or nothing thinking on the election still seems to hold sway. Falluja II is one of the results of this stubbornness. Of course, what I am proposing may be unrealistic. But what is being done in Falluja is equally unlikely to turn out to be realistic.

Today’s Op-Ed by Kenneth Pollack makes several suggestions for anyone thinking about American policy toward Iran. Of course, his main point is that we should think many times before threatening another invasion. First, our forces are already spread too thin. Second, no matter how much they may hate their government, most Iranians are nationalists first. Third, acting peremptorily would shatter even further the worldwide web of alliances that was shaken by our actions in Palestine and Iraq. A fourth argument he does not make is that we would once again be threatening to destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands for unclear gains.

Pollack’s answer is along the lines of Kerry’s “policy” for Iraq: consultation, consultation, consultation — with Iran and with the Europeans and Russians. Pollack is thinking of our need to somehow eliminate the specter of another nuclear state in the Middle East. But there are other reasons that might be more compelling. And as long as we do not change our effective nuclear policy it seems doubtful that we can stop any country determined to have nuclear weapons from eventually obtaining them.

My concentration is on another problem and another Iran. The theocracy is once again showing its teeth. More and more people are being imprisoned or silenced for trying to express themselves, attending overseas conferences, etc. The campaign has extended to the internet with growing restrictions on sites and on the people who have set them up. I note that one Iranian webmaster in Canada with a dissident site believes that he has been threatened with death. Today Iran still remains very far from the Afghanistan of the Taliban. But if it did veer in that direction, would we and the rest of the world just stand by and watch? Remember, in retrospect many have concluded that we should not have stood by after Hitler came to power.

What we need is a much more effective means to effect “regime change” or at least “regime moderation” without the use of bombers and gun ships. One always thinks of economic sanctions. But when is the last time one remembers economic sanctions actually working, particularly against a determined regime? Blasting the country with heavy handed propaganda or training and arming overseas dissidents are possibilities. But they are unlikely to work. For one thing the Iranians taken in by these measures would tend to become pariahs in their own country. An effective program would be much more subtle, much more under the control of patriotic Iranians who themselves want regime change. It is past time that we seriously develop such alternatives. We have seen that regardless how evil a regime may be, war to replace the regime is neither good for us, good for them, or acceptable by the international community. Consultation with our allies might be a part of a peaceful approach to regime change, but it would be only the beginning.

The election of Bush has produced a great outpouring of commentary about “what went wrong”. A careful consideration of the results by a variety of statistical categories produces (as reported in the NYT Week in Review this Sunday), however, a much more nuanced position than is often encountered. Bush increased his relative vote in nearly every category and nearly everywhere. A notable exception is the 18-29 group. In economic terms, only the very poor preferred Kerry over Bush, and this was probably due in large part to the minority status of many in this category. Beyond that, the Bush percentage of the vote increased with the income of the voters. People did vote their pocketbooks (or at least in what they believed to be their economic interest). Looking at education, only those with graduate training preferred Kerry, college graduates and nearly all with less education preferred Bush. Bush was not elected by the suburbs. In fact, Bush lost only in the largest cities, and did progressively better the less the concentration of population. However, if we compare with 2000, Bush improved his position in the larger cities and suburbs, but did less well than he had in 2000 in smaller cities and rural areas (which is quite a surprise). Regionally, Kerry did well in the Northeast, the Upper Midwest, and the Pacific Coast. Previous political scientists had characterized politics in much of this areas as “moralistic”. (See Raymond D. Gastil, Cultural Regions of the United States for a snapshot of how the country breaks down regionally and some of the reasons for it.)

However, at the end of the day, the differences among the statistical and even regional groupings are relatively unimportant. Even among the wealthiest people there were a large number who voted for Kerry and even among those with graduate education, 44% voted for Bush. For those convinced that the “morals” question defeated Kerry, let me suggest as a caution the results from Churchill County Nevada. President Bush received 71.5% of the vote. Yet at the same time the voters rejected a proposal to reimpose a ban on prostitution in the County. The county’s two houses of prostitution are now closed, but the voters appear to be looking toward the future. (I do not think “moral values” should be confused with questions of sexual behavior, but in an environment in which voting for a ban on gay marriages is considered to be a vote for “moral values”, I am using the word as it is currently used in the political discussion.)

Given this situation, the advice being given to the Democratic Party to get off its high horse and develop a more populist, down-home, “values-centered” approach to “middle America” is unfortunate, particularly for the longer term. Op-Eds by Garry Wills and Bob Herbert suggest a somewhat deeper, if much more difficult strategy. Garry Wills see the current crisis as the result of a long-term retreat from the ideals of the Enlightenment on which the country was founded. While the rest of the world has moved away from the traditional, religion-dominated societies of the past, America has moved backwards. He asks, “Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?” Herbert points out that a remarkable number of Americans still believe that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein was working closely with al-Qaida before 9/11. He wants to add “teach-ins” to get more information out to the people.

My suggestion is that we must start further back. We must improve the quality of education. This does not mean “test-centered” teaching meant to satisfy politicians. It means education that provides students a background of information and intellectual tools against which they can evaluate new information. It means developing in students everywhere habits of interacting with the media that they can hold onto as they proceed through life. It means a requirement for general education for all students in colleges, no matter how technical their career objectives. And along with the requirement there must be an administrative commitment to see to it that all students become actively involved in such courses, instead of simply taking them to fulfill a requirement. It also means a commitment to continuing education through the media of people at all levels and with all initial persuasions. Above all, it means a great deal of effort between elections and outside of elections. To accomplish this, some of those very wealthy persons who regularly contribute to liberal and moderate causes, especially in election years, should commit to a long-term effort to educate the American people in science, government, moral values, and religion as these are seen from the Enlightenment perspective of our Founding Fathers.

I do not know how to achieve the goals set out above. Much of the effort must mix entertainment and information, must appeal to both emotions and minds. There will need to be a great deal of research on what works and what does not, especially over a period of years. But what I do know is that the United States is becoming an uneducated, backward country. Many parts of the population always have been ignorant; much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were hardly “enlightened”. Yet today we are the only superpower. We are the leaders of the world. If we do not lead, little gets done. Yet we find our people ill-prepared for this role. In many ways we have become more democratic than we were in the Eighteenth Century when people were prepared to be led by an enlightened elite. This is no longer the case. Now, whether we like it or not, what the United States does in the world will be determined by the people, by their wants, likes, and dislikes, by their ignorance or their knowledge. At present our people are not up the challenge. It is imperative that they develop the capacity to knowledgeably judge and decide public affairs for a complex world. If they do not, our future, and that of humanity, is not promising.

Blogs have become the new media for many Americans. But it has come to my attention that they are increasingly seen as a source of information or “news”. In an environment in which there is entirely too much unverified and unverifiable, indeed willfully misleading, information disseminated, particularly through the internet and talk radio, it strikes me that perhaps those involved, bloggers and blog visitors alike, should develop a more restrained attitude toward blogs. Unlike email exchanged among friends and acquaintances, blogs are sent out to a potentially large and amorphous public unable to judge the nature and the limitations of the author. This being the case, a blogger should look on his blog as a responsible enterprise meant to be a vehicle for the dissemination of his or her commentary. This commentary should, in my estimation, be based primarily on information gained from standard and reliable sources.

This leads immediately to the question of what are “standard and reliable sources”. To me, this means sources that are given credibility on a day in and day out basis by the media or by the academic and scientific community. These sources are admittedly often misguided, less informed than they believe, or frankly misguided. But these sources do contrast markedly with what I refer to as “casual sources”. These are sources whose verity or verifiability has not generally been widely accepted in the communities referred to above. Most of what we might call “rumor” and most bitter and tendentious communications falls into the casual category. If the blogger is actually a creator of new information, then of course this can and should be disseminated through the blog. But if the blogger is not personally the creator, or personally able to verify a piece of information, then he or she should pass on casual information received from casual sources not at all or only after heavy qualification with reference to the source.

It is hard to believe that the elections are actually going to occur — and that they could be a reasonable success in spite of everything. Today’s paper reports on the decision of Iraq’s interim government, in spite of the objections of the Americans and the United Nations, to allow voting by Iraqis living outside the country. Because there is such a large Diaspora, this has been insisted on by the leading Shiite parties as well as Ayatollah Sistani himself. The Kurds also pushed for it. So even though they do not yet have a budget for what could be an expensive operation, it is apparently going to happen. The Afghans had expatriate voting in their last election, as did East Timor under the supervision of the UN. Certainly the Americans have it. So the Iraqis must feel they have a right. The paper says expatriate voting will more than ever infuriate the Sunni Arabs, because they have a relatively small number of expatriates. I wonder if this is really true. They were the wealthiest group prior to the invasion and the better off generally find their way out of troubled countries more easily than the poor. It should be encouraging to the Americans to note that the expatriates tend to be more secular than the people in the country. Although registration through the food distribution system got off to a shaky start, the process seems now to be up and running, at least in some areas.

Meanwhile Juan Cole reports that although the Association of Muslim Scholars, a group closely allied to the insurgency, has urged its followers to boycott the election, the Iraqi Islamic Party has been handing out pamphlets at Sunni Arab mosques pointing out the obvious, that is, if they do not vote they will end up essentially powerless in a new state. Several small Sunni parties are joining together in a coalition to fight the elections. Allawi’s Iraqi National Accord, a secular party essentially (since Allawi is a Shi’a) may also join with them. There are reports that the two main Kurdish parties will also join to make a coalition that could garner 35% of the vote. All these moves indicate a real feeling among many Iraqis that even though no one can stop the killing, the election can be held and that it can have a meaning for them. In the long run, this may be the best chance we all have to pacify the country. It is hard for outsiders listening to the daily blood letting to believe in all this, but there it is. Whether the planned attack on Falluja could help or harm progress toward elections remains unclear.

Today's news brings us an important interview in Lebanon with a Lebanese would-be suicide bomber. He went into Iraq to help the cause. After considering the alternatives he decided there that the best he could do was to be a suicide bomber. The impression one gets is that there is a well-organized, non-Iraqi movement working alongside the Iraqi resistance. However, the latter are in charge. There is also a great deal of money involved. He had to pay $500 to get smuggled into Iraq. He spent nearly all his time with other non-Iraqis in sealed rooms, one in Baghdad and one in Falluja. The Iraqis told them that they would have to pay $200 for a military kit (with grenades, a machine gun, grenade launcher etc.). They also had to pay for their food. The owner of the house in Falluja eventually said that they were attracting notice and might be bombed by the Americans. He suggested that they would do better to donate their money, go home, and raise more money there.

What one gathers from this is that the Iraqis are not really that welcoming of outsiders. They would prefer to keep the fight to themselves. It would also seem that in spite of the sense that much of the urban landscape in these cities is controlled by the insurgency, people such as our informant were almost always in hiding. When they went out it was in disguise. So lack of security is as much a problem for their side as ours, even in Falluja. This in itself would seem encouraging. The fact there is a worldwide propaganda movement for recruitment and donations is not, however, so reassuring. The fact that there is a larger supply of hopeful suicide bombers than is needed is also less reassuring.

Yesterday’s startling and detailed report in the New York Times on civilian casualties in Iraq was strangely not followed by discussion on television, either commercial or public. I hope the media remedy this nonresponse. One could imagine that they did not want to be attacked for making yet another attack on the Administration at this late date, particularly when any statistical study carried out in wartime is open to criticism. Perhaps they wanted to check out the data. I have made a preliminary check, and it seems to me that the study has to be taken seriously, even after all the caveats are weighed.

The reported Johns Hopkins study in the journal Lancet was prepublished on the web at this address. It estimates on the basis of a statistical survey that about 100,000 civilians have died as the result of the American-led invasion. (Many of the men may actually have been insurgents, but not soldiers in the usual sense.) Some of these were indirect casualties, caused, for example, by people less able to get timely medical assistance due to the fighting. But the study suggests that the great majority of the “excess deaths” were caused from the air by bombs, helicopter gunships etc. The study points out in an aside that may lead readers to have greater confidence in it, that only three deaths were reported by their interviewees as were attributable to mistakes on the ground by American soldiers In two of these cases the soldiers later apologized.

This study greatly increases the seriously of our undertaking. The highest non-propaganda estimates of civilian deaths I had seen previously were below 20,000. One method of counting based on newspaper accounts puts the figure at about 15,000 (600 in Falluja). This may be found at this site.

The study team took a sample survey of household clusters from January 2002 to date. They interviewed 33 clusters representing about 6000 people, being sure to make the sampling as representative of Iraq as a whole as possible. They looked at death rates from all causes before the America-led invasion and afterwards. Once the death rates were established, then the results were extrapolated to the country as a whole. They found it difficult to work in Falluja (study done in September of this year) and so left it out of their calculation. (They went there anyhow and have what data they could collect.) If Falluja were included, they believe the final figures would be much greater.

This suggests that we are still a long way from being able to use heavy firepower to overwhelm an opponent without causing a high level of casualties among civilian populations. This is not to say that greater precision in the use of firepower, particularly from the air, has not helped. Some European countries suffered mortalities over a period of five years in World War II as high as 10% of their pre-war population. We are speaking here of one and one-half years of war that killed (or caused to die) perhaps 0.35% of the population. Nevertheless, this cost is not at all trivial. We can certainly understand why many Iraqis and others see the war and what goes with it as unjustifiable and immoral.

This suggests once again that after Tuesday’s election, the American Administration must seriously rethink what the war is doing to its position in the world, as well as to the people directly affected. We must consider how we might be able to bring the war to a speedy conclusion. If it does not look as though we can with the forces on the ground bring it to an end, then we must either greatly increase those forces (hopefully with the assistance of other countries) or we must, in consultation with British, Kurdish, and Shiite leaders, together with the Allawi government, devise a means for a relatively quick and orderly exit. We must do all this remembering that if we handle the process poorly we may leave behind a society so torn apart by rivalries new and old that the fatalities discussed here will end up seeming trivial. Our invasion, no matter how idealistic its rationale might have been for many of those initiating it, has opened a Pandora's box. It will be hard to force the lid back on.

Perhaps we should wait until after the January elections. But regardless of the benefit or reality of these elections, we must begin planning now for how we end it, for even in the best case January is likely to bring to power a new government that will be just as unacceptable to many of the insurgents as the Allawi regime is today.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies in its latest “Comments” takes a position on the reform of American intelligence. Its conclusion is that the egregious errors in handling the situation leading up to 9/11 should not lead to the kind of changes that the 9/11 Commission, seconded by the U.S. Senate, are proposing. The difficulty that needs to be addressed is that the information gathered at lower levels is not getting up to those who could act on it at the top in a timely fashion, if at all. Placing another layer above the CIA may simply make the situation worse.

They point out that a pre 9/11 reorganization was an attempt to get the information to the NSC. This was useful but not enough. As they say: “Well before 9/11, there was a bureaucratic mechanism in place for gathering intelligence at the appropriate level in the form of the CSG, which had been enshrined by presidential decision directive as the government’s counter-terrorism crisis-management nerve centre at the NSC. As chairman of the CSG, Richard Clarke made breaking down inter-agency anxieties about sharing information a priority but had not been completely successful. The problem before 9/11, then, was not the absence of a top-level clearinghouse for pooling intelligence on terrorist threats from multiple agencies. Rather, the trouble was that key officials in the individual agencies themselves did not rate intelligence that turned out to be important as sufficiently probative to filter up to the NSC.”

The “Comments” also sum up the advice offered by Henry Kissinger with the support of others, which concluded (note that the NID is the new position being advocated by the 9/11 Commission and the Senate; DCI is the present Director of Central Intelligence):

“Shortly before the House version of the intelligence reform bill was introduced, Henry Kissinger, with the support of a bipartisan group of former high-ranking officials, in testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee cautioned Congress against taking ‘irrevocable legislative action’ prompted by any false sense of urgency that the election cycle might have created. Kissinger was generally concerned with creating another layer - in the form of the NID - between the president and existing intelligence institutions. His specific worries included:

• weakening the relationship between intelligence analysts and operations officers;

• potentially compromising democratic principles by institutionally melding domestic intelligence with foreign intelligence;

• suppressing competing views;

• blurring lines of authority between the NID and the NSC;

• the questionable advisability of folding tactical and operational military intelligence into a predominantly civilian multi-agency structure; and

• the inclination of the 9/11 Commission to ignore more incremental and less disruptive means of achieving reform through existing institutions, such as the DCI.”

Good points, well made.

As suggested in previous postings, it seems to me that there should be an operational office alongside the NSC that has responsibility for action. Such an office would be more likely to demand needed intelligence and coordination than the advisory and fact-gathering groups that seem to be in the loop discussed above. One would office would be in Homeland Security. But this is not the way this agency is structured. It is more like the old Civil Defense or FEMA agencies that have to do with managing crises, with reaching out to everybody, mobilizing first responders etc. Perhaps a thorough redoing of Homeland Security would give us such a capability, but probably the complexion of that agency is already set (and I believe it might as well be dismantled). The FBI and the CIA are both very ineffective agencies (because of a combination of the quality of their personnel and their institutional culture). The first task is to remold their cultures and personnel (a long and perhaps impossible task). The FBI is set up to control internal crime by getting indictments in the court system. This is a task that must be done in the end in many terrorism cases, but it leads to different priorities and a different sense of time than the terrorism issue demands. Most of the CIA is concerned with fact gathering. A section send out small units on ad hoc military assignments in overseas situations. It does not, however, have the command function and field forces that would be demanded by serious security threats playing out in the United States. Somehow this lack has to be remedied without damaging civil freedoms in the country more than the terrorism scare already has.

As I have often emphasized, terrorism is many things and the war in Iraq is not simply another form of Islamic terrorism. Nevertheless, an excellent discussion of terrorism through analyzing the statements of Islamic terrorists was presented in the Op-Ed page Wednesday. The Islamists talk continually on the internet, and according to these reporters they are getting happier and happier about what is going on. After a downcast mood following the defeat of the Taliban, they now feel that our position in Iraq is about the same as that of the USSR before they were driven out of Afghanistan. They point out to one another our mistake of taking on two guerrilla wars at the same time, and also of fighting insurgents with unlimited access to arms and money. They see the fighting as leading to a religious revival among the Sunnis in Iraq and the whole Islamic world. They regard Iraq as a great recruiting ground for Muslims everywhere. Lashkar-e-Taiba, the leading Jihadist “army” in Pakistan is now shifting its sights from Kashmir to Iraq. They also point to a parallel development among the Shiites among which a leading divine preaches that events in Iraq are a harbinger of the return of the Mahdi. “A fire will come from the sky and swallow up Baghdad”, apparently a kind of Shiite Armageddon. The authors of the Op-Ed conclude by advising us to not be taken in by the Administration’s rosy picture. We are in a mess and will be lucky to get out. In this election season, many are saying this because of their visceral opposition to the President. But these analysts are particularly well informed.

The report in today’s paper from Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province, underscores the difficulties. Apparently, while we have been worrying about Falluja, Ramadi has been going from bad to worse. The 400,000 people in the city are essentially out of either our control or that of the Allawi administration. Our forces can guard particular buildings and take convoys through the city. But around every corner there is another sniper. No one feels safe anywhere. And those Iraqis not with the resistance find it in their interest to pretend they are. Again we hear the refrain that the government troops and police are with few exceptions completely worthless, or even worse than worthless. They openly speak of the American soldiers as dogs and talk of fighting them one day. The Marine commanders know they can win any battle, but they seem quite hopeless when it comes to winning the war. The idea of using the Americans in the city to do something other than fight has essentially been abandoned. Reconstruction is at a standstill.

Recent days have seen recurrent attacks on our forces and on government forces in Iraq, some bloodier than others. But more alarming, reporters are continuing to report widespread hatred of American soldiers, even within Shi’a areas. Reporters who have recently talked to new recruits in the Iraq’s police and military units tell reporters they hate Americans and would gladly fight them. We should consider once again why this might to so.

President Bush believes that he is offering the Iraqi people freedom and democracy. He cannot understand why they will not accept these gifts because in his mind these are what all people want. However, while Bush speaks of democracy, the average Iraqi may see something else. First, he may see an occupation that threatens to take his homeland away from him. We say this is silly, but our judgement is not there’s. They have been occupied before, by the Ottomans, the Persians, and the British. It is not impossible to understand that we are just another power in this tradition. Second, they see us as Christians invading a Muslim land. We are in this sense desecrating holy land, putting down Islam while raising up Christianity as the more successful religion. (Certainly this is the way the ancient Israelites viewed their wars, their victories and defeats.) Third, when we say that we are bringing democracy and freedom this means little to a people who have never lived with these. It is easy for them to believe these are mere slogans. They know that we are bringing modernism, rationalism, and decadent ideas and behaviors from a sinful West. These changes may mean much more to them than the promise of democracy.

I have played with the idea of comparing what is happening in Iraq to our forces to what happened to Napoleon’s forces in Russia as reported in War and Peace. Napoleon easily conquered the most important parts of Russia and took Moscow in a walk. Yet his forces eventually had to leave and as they went home through the Russian winter they were destroyed. They were destroyed by a ragtag army that harried his forces all the way back. Much of their fighting might be called guerrilla war. It is important to realize that Napoleon also was bringing the modern world to Russia. Everywhere he went in Europe he established modern states with a new rule of law. It wasn’t democracy, but it was a new and superior political system. It guaranteed much more freedom to the average person than the systems it replaced. Yet the Russian peasants, ground down under the heel of oppressive tsars, resisted fiercely. They resisted because the invader threatened to destroy their way of life, to replace the Orthodox Church (or so they thought). The French were outsiders who did not belong in Russia, so they were attacked and attacked until the last one had left the country. The situation is different now (we have better supply routes and equipment for one thing). Yet there are some similarities that we should take to heart.

In an Op-Ed today, Zbigniew Brezezinski develops the outlines of a strategy that might help us escape from the traps that recent policy has allowed the United states to fall into in the Middle East. It is not too striking an effort, but nevertheless it offers many more useful ideas than either candidate has yet offered. He begins by expressing his fear that some elements of the Bush Administration are tempted by the idea of developing a “Holy Alliance” against Islam. This would include the Christians, Orthodox Russia under Putin, India with its Hindu-Muslim struggle, and Israel with its Jewish-Christian connection. They might even hope on other bases to entice China and Japan into the Alliance. He sees this as a dangerous approach that offers many dangers and few gains. He is happy that Kerry and his people would not follow this route, but feels they do not have enough ideas of their own to find a way out. Without more reason to do so than Kerry has put forward, he believes that our European allies will remain unwilling to help Kerry obtain his objectives in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Brezezinski would have a new administration get together with our European allies to develop a “Grand Alliance” that would embrace the Middle East and its problems by taking on in collaboration with moderate Middle Eastern countries the three major challenges that we face in the region: Israel-Palestine, Iraq, and a restless Iran. We should begin with a joint statement of the European Union and the United States on Israel-Palestine. It would outline a solution and include a commitment to international peacekeeping to help with the aftermath. Second, the European Union would make a major financial commitment to the recovery of Iraq and commit a significant military force so that the United States might be able to reduce the size of the American presence. It might be possible in this context to get some moderate Muslim states to also commit forces. Third, the United States and the European Union would open exploratory discussions with Iran on regional security, including questions of nuclear proliferation, Iraq, and Afghanistan. This should be combined with a carrot of normalizing relations with the West. He believes that our European allies would find it difficult to stay out of the projected Grand Alliance because of the dangers they see in allowing the United States to continue to go it alone. They fear as much as he does that we might just decide to unilaterally withdraw from Iraq, or lash out again by attacking Iran.